Blood alchohol levels: history of testing

Never.

Tests are only run if there's a reason to run them.

If you mean when could they perform the test, I'm sure it would go back around a century. Pretty easy to test for really, but it's never been a standard test they run on everyone or anything like that.

What sort of testing? I mean chemical analysis of stomach contents or opening a 'client' up and opening stomach and getting knocked out by the stench of alcohol? Smell was often used in pre-scientific medicine to determine certain things, e.g. a man with a very bad wound on his abdomen could be given garlic to eat and the doc would then wait a while and give a good sniff to see if he could smell garlic - if he could then it meant that the wound had penetrated the gut and all was not well.

Cross posted and you have answered my query. See here http://www.drinkdriving.org/drink_driving_information_uklawhistory.php for some information about British Law and alcohol testing.

Al Stevens said:

When (what year) did coroners begin measuring and recording blood alcohol levels in their deceased clients?

Thanks in advance.

Click to expand...

This is from a Temperance lecture in the late 1870s: "These gentleman [coroners] cut open dead drunkards and find alcohol in the blood ..."

A quick search, however, seems to indicate that it wasn't until 1918 when Erick M.P. Widmark developed a modern method for reliably measuring the quantity of alcohol in the blood. (He improved the method even further in 1922, which seems to be pretty much the modern gold standard test). Even then it wasn't until the 1930s when Widmark's method was approved in the USA for regular forensic purposes.

Does this help?

Mac