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<\/a><\/p>\nIn the way of people whose lives seem charmed, Thomas soon married a member of the Hollywood’s elite, Jack Pickford, younger brother of screen star Mary Pickford. The couple rapidly developed a reputation for wild behavior, intense partying, and intense quarreling, usually over his numerous affairs – he’d developed syphilis as a result of one of them. They separated, reunited, separated, and tried again, delighting the gossip magazines. “She and Jack were madly in love with one another but I always thought of them as a couple of children playing together,” Mary Pickford observed sadly in her autobiography many years later.<\/p>\n
In early September 1920 the couple sailed to Paris, reportedly on a reconciliation holiday. They checked into the Hotel Ritz and whirled off to enjoy the Prohibition-free city, drinking and dancing at Left Bank bistros until the early morning. At the end of one particularly drunken spree, Pickford and Thomas staggered into their hotel room at nearly three in the morning. Jack, barely standing, fell into the bed. His wife, still energized by the adventure, puttered around the room, wrote a letter, and, finally tiring, went into the bathroom to get ready for sleep.<\/p>\n
As Pickford told the police, he was floating in a whiskeyed haze when Olive began screaming, over and over, “Oh my god, my god.” He stumbled into the dimly lit bathroom, where she was leaning against the counter. Mistaking it for her sleeping medicine, she had picked up a bottle of the bichloride of mercury potion that he rubbed on his painful syphilis sores, poured a dose, and chugged it down. As the corrosive sublimate burned down her throat, she had a moment to realize her mistake. He caught her up and carried her back to the bed, grabbing the phone and calling for an ambulance. “Oh my god,” she repeated, “I’m poisoned.”<\/p>\n
As the story broke, as Thomas lingered in the hospital for three more days, the newspapers repeated every rumor smoking around them: Pickford’s infidelities had driven her to suicide; he had wished to get rid of her and tricked her into taking the poison. As the days passed, he became more evil, she more saintly. So many people flocked to Thomas’s funeral in Paris that women fainted in the crush and the streets became carpeted with countless hats, knocked off and trampled.<\/p>\n The police launched an investigation, including an autopsy, and concluded that it was, as Pickford had said, just a terrible accident. In an interview with the Los Angeles Examiner<\/em> after his return to California, Pickford dwelled on how much his wife had wanted to life: “The physicians held out hope for her until the last moment, until they found her kidneys paralyzed. Then they lost hope. But the doctors told me she had fought harder than any patient they ever had.”<\/p>\n Olive Thomas’s demise, for all the feverish attention it received, was actually a rather standard death from bichloride of mercury. In New York City the medical examiner’s office calculated that the compound caused about twenty deaths a year, mostly suicides and similarly unfortunate accidents.<\/p>\n Culled from:\u00a0The Poisoner\u2019s Handbook<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Here’s another lovely artistic image culled from\u00a0the book\u00a0M<\/a>\u00fc<\/a>tter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia<\/a>\u00a0by Gretchen Worden.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nCoronal Section of the Head\u00a0Du Jour!<\/h3>\n