As a professor of science journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Deborah Blum has not lost the skills of good storytelling she honed as a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. She put them to excellent use a couple of years back in "Ghost Hunters," a wonderful account of 19th-century investigations into supernatural and extrasensory manifestations, and they show no diminishment in her new book.

Take Mike the Durable, which is what New York City newspapers in 1933 called him (after his durability had run out). Mike Malloy was a frail, drink-sodden wretch whom fellow barflies determined to kill for the insurance money. Trouble was, Mike resisted dying, despite being fed poisonous booze, then a sandwich of rotting sardines, ground glass and metal shavings; and being soaked in icy water and run down by a car.

Finally he succumbed to carbon monoxide, but the murderers, none a criminal mastermind, were quickly found out, convicted and executed.

The grimly comic anecdote of Mike is typical of cases, both odd and fearsome, that Ms. Blum uses to illustrate the development of forensic science in New York and the United States in the first four decades of the 20th century.

The story, engagingly written and extensively researched, is structured around the heroic efforts of Charles Norris, named New York's first professional medical examiner in 1918, working with Alexander Gettler, a Hungarian immigrant who eventually became the country's leading toxicologist.

It is a considerable understatement to say that the men were dedicated to their work; Dr. Norris, from a prominent family, often used his own funds to pay salaries and buy equipment. They needed dedication, for they started at a time of corrupt and incompetent coroners.

The author divides her book into poisons, devoting a chapter (sometimes two) to:

Chloroform, methyl and ethyl alcohol, cyanide, arsenic, mercury, carbon monoxide, radium and thallium.

But criminals weren't the only culprits. Poisons were in the air we breathed, water we drank and commercial products we used or ingested. Mercury compounds, for example, were sold as bedbug killers, laxatives, antiseptics and diuretics.

The different ways that elements sicken and kill are gruesomely fascinating. Among the worst is radium, once widely used in health aids and to illuminate clock faces. Workers handling radium eventually became literal physical wrecks, their bones shattering.

However, it was ethyl alcohol, considered by Mr. Gettler "the most important poison," that caused the most deaths and injuries. He feared the coming of Prohibition because he foresaw the skyrocketing problems from the adulteration of alcohol.

Americans, knowingly taking great risks, drank the most god-awful stuff, usually made from industrial alcohol. Bootleggers would come up with a mix of additives, always toxic.

In the long run, Dr. Norris and Mr. Gettler won. They had immensely advanced toxicology and forensic science and the public health. They were, Ms. Blum writes, "revolutionaries who worked in civil service" and "changed the poison game."

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