It wasn’t until 1840 that James Marsh developed a test to determine if someone had been killed by arsenic, changing forensic science forever. But the idea has been around for a couple of hundred years already.
The career of John Cotta shows us that the idea of forensic toxicology greatly preceded the ability. Cotta was a doctor in the early 1600s, a strange time in which old superstitions overlapped with the scientific study of medicine. He wrote a book about the modern and scientific methods of discovering witches in 1616. Really. Cotta also thought of himself as an expert in forensics. In 1620, he was summoned by Sir Euseby Andrew, who was ill and convinced that he was being poisoned. He suspected his wife’s companion, Mistress Moyle, of giving him poisoned “broths and jellies.” Andrew made no secret of his worries, but no one believed him but Cotta. A minister who attended Andrew near his death even admonished him not to make false accusations just before he meets his maker. Then Andrew died.
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Cotta and another physician performed an autopsy, and Moyle was eventually charged with murder. But there was no Marsh test at the time. Read about the case of possible poisoning and the trial that followed at Legal History Miscellany. -via Strange Company
(Image credit: Wellcome Images)
Source: neatorama