Alexander Gettler

Alexander Gettler was an American toxicologist who served in the New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner from 1918 to 1959, working alongside Chief Medical Examiner Charles Norris. He was the first forensic chemist employed in that capacity by a United States city and became known as the father of forensic toxicology in America. Gettler developed new chemical testing methods for detecting poisons, including the first use of a spectrograph in a criminal investigation, a 1935 thallium poisoning case, and identified the normal presence of carbon monoxide in the human body in 1933. He also established toxicology coursework at City College of New York in 1935, and the American Academy of Forensic Sciences later created the Alexander O. Gettler Award in his honor. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/