A New York Times Notable Book The inspiration for PBS's AMERICAN EXPERIENCE film The Poison Squad. From Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times-bestselling author Deborah Blum, the dramatic true story of how food was made safe in the United States and the heroes, led by the inimitable Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley, who fought for change By the end of nineteenth century, food was dangerous. Lethal, even. "Milk" might contain formaldehyde, most often used to embalm corpses. Decaying meat was preserved with both salicylic acid, a pharmaceutical chemical, and borax, a compound first identified as a cleaning product. This was not by accident; food manufacturers had rushed to embrace the rise of industrial chemistry, and were knowingly selling harmful products. Unchecked by government regulation, basic safety, or even labelling requirements, they put profit before the health of their customers. By some estimates, in New York City alone, thousands of children were killed by "embalmed milk" every year. Citizens--activists, journalists, scientists, and women's groups--began agitating for change. But even as protective measures were enacted in Europe, American corporations blocked even modest regulations. Then, in 1883, Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley, a chemistry professor from Purdue University, was named chief chemist of the agriculture department, and the agency began methodically investigating food and drink fraud, even conducting shocking human tests on groups of young men who came to be known as, "The Poison Squad." Over the next thirty years, a titanic struggle took place, with the courageous and fascinating Dr. Wiley campaigning indefatigably for food safety and consumer protection. Together with a gallant cast, including the muckraking reporter Upton Sinclair, whose fiction revealed the horrific truth about the Chicago stockyards; Fannie Farmer, then the most famous cookbook author in the country; and Henry J. Heinz, one of the few food producers who actively advocated for pure food, Dr. Wiley changed history. When the landmark 1906 Food and Drug Act was finally passed, it was known across the land, as "Dr. Wiley's Law." Blum brings to life this timeless and hugely satisfying "David and Goliath" tale with righteous verve and style, driving home the moral imperative of confronting corporate greed and government corruption with a bracing clarity, which speaks resoundingly to the enormous social and political challenges we face today.

The world's most comprehensive, well documented and well illustrated book on this subject. With extensive subject and geographical index. 66 photographs and illustrations - mostly color. Free of charge in digital PDF format on Google Books.

"Harvey Wiley spent most of his professional life advocating for food free of adulterants and preservatives. He was a proponent of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, and he ran the Division (later Bureau) of Chemistry at the US Department of Agriculture from 1883 to 1912. He gained fame for the so-called Poison Squad experiments-in which Wiley's own employees at the USDA consumed food mixed with additives and were studied for their body chemistry. In this biography, Jonathan Rees examines Wiley's many and varied conflicts over food safety"--

Long before Dr. Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly made most readers' acquaintance in Patrick Taylor's bestselling novel An Irish Country Doctor, he appeared in a series of humorous columns originally published in Stitches: The Journal of Medical Humour. These warm and wryly amusing vignettes provide an early glimpse at the redoubtable Dr. O'Reilly as he tends to the colourful and eccentric residents of Ballybucklebo, a cozy Ulster village nestled in the bygone years of the early sixties. Those seminal columns have been collected in The Wily O'Reilly: Irish Country Stories. In this convenient volume, Patrick Taylor's legions of devoted fans can savor the enchanting origins of the Irish Country series . . . and newcomers to Ballybucklebo can meet O'Reilly for the very first time. An ex-Navy boxing champion, classical scholar, crypto-philanthropist, widower, and hard-working general practitioner, Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly is crafty and cantankerous in these charming slices of rural Irish life. Whether he's educating a naive man of the cloth in the facts of life, dealing with chronic hypochondriacs and malingerers, clashing with pigheaded colleagues, or raising a pint in the neighborhood pub, the wily O'Reilly knows a doctor's work is never done, even if some of his "cures" can't be found in any medical text! At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

In the Presence of Our Enemies has been meticulously researched, containing facts from years of Congressional investigations, as well as authoritative books written by historians and participants alike of the 20 Century''''s assault on the unique form of government fashioned through, as George Washington described, "a miracle at Philadelphia." To achieve this destruction and planned replacement with a socialist society amalgamated into a global government, it is first necessary to destroy traditional morality, a campaign conducted through every avenue of communication, with particular focus on textbooks and schools. Their legacy marches relentlessly onward. Meet the sociologists, the psychiatrists, the ''''educators,'''' moral degenerates, who banded together from countries around the world focusing on the redistribution of American wealth, and changing the culture which gave them birth. They gained entry into American Schools, colleges, legislative halls, and their descendants still promote a Fabian Socialist World Society supported by American taxes. Nothing has changed since Soviet leader Nikta Khrushchev in 1957, told us what was planned: "I can prophesy that your grandchildren in America will live under socialism...Your grandchildren will....not understand how their grandparents did not understand the progressive nature of socialist society...."

From ancient Greek theory to the explosive discoveries of the 20th century, this authoritative history shows how major chemists, their discoveries, and political, economic, and social developments transformed chemistry into a modern science. 209 illustrations. 14 tables. Bibliographies. Indices. Appendices.