Arsenic, strychnine, and nicotine – Why Agatha Christie poison murders was
The Gutbesitzerin Emily Inglethorp at night shaken by severe cramps. Your family members want to help her, but her bedroom door is firmly closed. The men present throw themselves against the door, but as this is open at last, you can whisper the rich Lady the name of her husband. Then she dies. In a strychnine-poisoning.
With this unusual murder case, the then unknown Agatha Christie enters the stage of world literature. Was published the novel in Britain in 1921, written in a you had world war II already in 1916, during the First. The newly married Agatha Christie did voluntary service in a hospital in the seaside resort of Torquay. The Start didn’t go quite round: Christie was the beginning of the war 24 years old, came from a better house and was completely inexperienced. “It is ironic that, given the grisly death suffered by many of their characters, there was a time when she was at the sight of blood fainted,” said Alasdair Brooks, Heritage Manager for the British Red cross, told the Observer. The Red cross had published only recently, the internal records of Christie’s service.
Agatha Christie in the hospital
Working in the hospital was too much for Christie. Operations and amputations – Christie was trouble and was treated in the pharmacy. Overall, they served from October 1914 to September 1918, 3400 hours in Torquay’s Town Hall Hospital. “But Christie would not have been released from the hospital, to work in a pharmacy, they would not have obtained perhaps your in-depth Knowledge about poisons that she used in her novels,” says Brooks.
Christie himself has declared their love for poisons this way: “the shelves around me poisons were, and so it was perhaps only natural that I adopted a poison in the eye!” And indeed, In about 80 crime novels you killed in 41 with poison. The Knowledge that you acquired in the pharmacy, helped her with her books. “Because I was surrounded by poisons, perhaps it was obvious that death by poisoning should be the method chosen,” says Christie.
30. April 1917, she received the certificate of the “Society of Apothecaries of London”, that it enabled her to medicinal products for Doctors. And you kept a record of the substances, their (areas of change)effect and application. And she did it with scientific accuracy, as Prof. Volkmar Schneider from the Institute for legal medicine of the Free University of Berlin, and Dr. Benno Riesselmann, the national Institute for forensic and social medicine in Berlin, in a study in 2002 showed.
For Riesselmann the accurate representation of the poison effect, the circumscribed although literary is reached, but otherwise almost textbook level, a reason not to consider the novels just as entertainment literature. Another reason is the excellent representation of the frequent misperceptions, before which even specialists are not filed is. Dr. Riesselmann refers to the novel “The pale horse” in which the Thallium poisoning of a doctor are not detected and failure is diagnosed.
In her first work, she brought her victims with strychnine around the corner. 13 killings “perpetrated” the Queen of crime novels later, with hydrocyanic acid (hydrogen cyanide), nine Times the arsenic transported their victims to the grave. Mophium comes seven Times to use. Water Hemlock she tried only once. “I don’t know anything about pistols and revolvers, so my characters with a blunt object, or, better still, with poison killed,” wrote Christie about their methods of Murder. “Besides, poison is refined and clean and really exciting… I think I could look a ghastly mangled corpse in the face.”
Like Agatha Christie a child saved the life of
The reading of Agatha Christie may also decide in the reality of life and death, shows an incident from the year 1977 from England. At the time a 19-month-old child had been admitted to a London clinic. The course of the disease was mysterious. The Doctors were at a loss because the symptoms were ambiguous. Nausea made diarrhea and sleep disturbances a definite diagnosis impossible – had it not been for a crime-obsessed nurse. She recognized the symptoms, the also described Christie in one of her novels very carefully: poisoning by Thallium. The diagnosis was correct, the child was saved.
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