Arsenic
has been the go-to poison for people wanting to get rid of family
members for centuries. It's odorless, tasteless, produces symptoms of
illness that can be attributed to natural causes, and for most of
history, hard to detect after the fact. When divorce was difficult,
arsenic was easy. Tests were eventually developed to detect arsenic in a
human body, but they weren't reliable enough to persuade juries in
cases without additional evidence. That is, until British chemist James
Marsh developed the Marsh test in 1836, which made its dramatic
courtroom debut a few years later.
Perhaps the
most famous use of Marsh’s test was in the trial of Marie Lafarge in
1840, in which the defendant stood accused of poisoning her husband.
Young Marie had entered an arranged marriage with Charles Lafarge
believing him to be a wealthy, cultured businessman, and when she found
out he was in fact a boorish clod with a run-down chateau, rough sexual
habits and substantial debt, she got to putting arsenic in his food.
(Friends mentioned that they’d heard her asking casually about mourning
fashions: How long did you have to wear black, again?) By the time
Charles came to realize his wife’s devotion to home cooking was not a
loving gesture, it was too late.
A back-and-forth festival of
forensic testing ensued: local scientists first analyzed the dead man’s
beverages, stomach tissue and vomit; and while they claimed to have
found arsenic, their glassware broke during testing. Moreover, defense
counsel was upset at use of outdated techniques, and called in Mateu
Orfila, dean of the Paris Faculty of Medicine and the era’s premier
toxicologist, who confirmed that only the Marsh test would be credible
in court.
At the time, people were skeptical of
forensic scientists, particularly when a defendant's life was at stake.
Testimony about test results wasn't enough; they wanted to see the test
performed. So what was left of the victim's body was brought into the
court for the Marsh test, resulting in trial spectators buying 500
bottles of smelling salts.
Read what happened at that trial, and how the results influenced forensic science, at Atlas Obscura.
In many ways, Marsden fits the profile of a daring female explorer of the Victorian age. She went to Siberia to find a particular medicinal herb that she thought could cure leprosy, and to meet sufferers of the disease living in the Russian forest. Her advocacy for leprosy patients has since made her a local hero—there’s even a very large diamond named after her—but in her own time, her adventurousness, coupled with gossip about her personal life and sexual preference, brought her only infamy. After she returned from Siberia, she was vilified as a fabulist and an embezzler who had betrayed people who trusted her. Her critics questioned her motives for going to Sosnovka at all: What was she really after? Or was she just running away from something?
