The Tiszazug Poisoning RingIn 1911, a midwife arrived in the isolated Hungarian village of Nagyrév and quietly began supplying arsenic solutions to the women around her. By 1929, she had helped transform a community of desperate wives and daughters into one of the most prolific murder rings in modern history, a network whose victims numbered in the hundreds and whose concealment lasted nearly two decades.
The Tiszazug Poisoning Ring is the definitive account of the Tiszazug poisoning epidemic: a forensic, social, and moral reckoning with a crime that was simultaneously extraordinary and entirely comprehensible. Drawing on trial records, forensic reports, and the intellectual debate the revelations ignited across interwar Hungary, this book reconstructs the world that produced the ring, the arranged marriages and patriarchal violence, the post-war economic devastation, the institutional abandonment of rural communities, the geography of enclosure and silence that made concealment not merely possible but structurally inevitable.
From the chemistry of arsenic in degraded bone to the political management of the trials, from the lives of the women who killed to the lives of the men who died, this is history written with unflinching attention to the full human complexity of a community that found, in a colourless liquid dispensed from an ordinary kitchen, the only exit a broken social order had left available. Compelling, rigorous, and profoundly unsettling, The Tiszazug Poisoning Ring demands to be read.
The Tiszazug Poisoning RingIn 1911, a midwife arrived in the isolated Hungarian village of Nagyrév and quietly began supplying arsenic solutions to the women around her. By 1929, she had helped transform a community of desperate wives and daughters into one of the most prolific murder rings in modern history, a network whose victims numbered in the hundreds and whose concealment lasted nearly two decades.
The Tiszazug Poisoning Ring is the definitive account of the Tiszazug poisoning epidemic: a forensic, social, and moral reckoning with a crime that was simultaneously extraordinary and entirely comprehensible. Drawing on trial records, forensic reports, and the intellectual debate the revelations ignited across interwar Hungary, this book reconstructs the world that produced the ring, the arranged marriages and patriarchal violence, the post-war economic devastation, the institutional abandonment of rural communities, the geography of enclosure and silence that made concealment not merely possible but structurally inevitable.
From the chemistry of arsenic in degraded bone to the political management of the trials, from the lives of the women who killed to the lives of the men who died, this is history written with unflinching attention to the full human complexity of a community that found, in a colourless liquid dispensed from an ordinary kitchen, the only exit a broken social order had left available. Compelling, rigorous, and profoundly unsettling, The Tiszazug Poisoning Ring demands to be read.
