ColleenMc wrote: ↑November 23rd, 2018, 5:31 pm
Poisoning by Canned Goods (from Medico-Legal Journal V. 2, 1885) by John J. Johnson
I'm a retired police officer/detective who was also a crime scene tech, so I'm interested in older true crime and forensic medicine stories. This was (to me anyway) a pretty fascinating story of medical detection in the very early days of the science, and I like how the author presented his deductive reasoning so logically. It almost read like a Sherlock Holmes story.
Fair warning, though, some of the details of the illness of the unfortunate poisoning victims is pretty graphic and gross!
Colleen
John G. Johnson 's interesting life---When Colleen read "Poisoning by Canned Goods" for this volume of the Nonfiction Collection, it tasked me, as Book Coordinator, to find out some basic facts about Dr. Johnson's life, so that our Metacoordinator Jo could subsequently add his name to the LibriVox catalog. This took a little doing. JGJ has a "generic name" and shares it, no less, with another 19th century JGJ, who was a prominent lawyer and art collector.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_G._Johnson. Wikipedia ignores our JGJ.
All I knew to start with was that our JGJ was an M.D., not a lawyer, and that he was practicing medicine in Brooklyn N.Y when he wrote the food poisoning article in 1885 . This afternoon, I threaded my way through the internet, aided by several cups of coffee and a Midwestern snow storm, which kept me glued to my computer, and finally, I hit the jackpot with a volume on Google Books:
The Eagle and Brooklyn, The Record of the Progress of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Issued in Commemoration of its Semi-Centennial and Occupancy of its New Building (1893).
https://books.google.com/books?id=SUsMAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA678&dq=john+g+johnson+m.d.+Bellevue+hospital&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwisruqIw_DeAhUxhuAKHS3_AGE4ChDoAQgpMAA
A section devoted to prominent citizens of Brooklyn had an article about our JGJ which was interesting indeed. Here we find out that Dr. Johnson, who began his practice in Brooklyn in 1857, not only solved the mystery of the canned tomato poisonings, but that
"he succeeded, with the assistance of the Eagle, in preventing the canning factories of Baltimore from utilizing chloride of zinc instead of rosin as a flux in sealing their goods for market."
Thumbs up to all our Nonfiction Collection readers and their interesting reads.
That was an interesting article. 
Yes, it never hurts to listen to what others say before we respond! The first story, about the peach with a bite out of it resonated with me; I have an apple tree in my yard...
- this time.