Famed mystery novelist Agatha Christie passed away on this day in 1976. She wrote 66 detective novels total, plus a bunch of short stories. There’s plenty that could be written about her career and personal life, but today we’re taking a look at her background in pharmacy.
Christie frequently centered her murder mysteries around poisonings, and she displayed strong knowledge of how those concoctions actually functioned. She got that knowledge while working as an assistant dispenser in a Red Cross hospital during the First World War.
Christie was licensed as a dispenser, and she sure knew her stuff. At one point, she caught a pharmacist making a compounding error that could have caused severe side effects for patients. Instead of confronting him, she sneakily knocked the medicine onto the ground and crushed them.
She worked in a pharmacy again during the Second World War; one of her books was even based on a suggestion by a pharmacist she worked with at the time. We won’t spoil the end of The Pale Horse, but the poisoning plot ended up helping some doctors treat a patient suffering from the same affliction as the victim in the book. Like we said, she knew her stuff.
You can learn more about Christie in this list of 100 interesting facts on her website.
