Doug Miller wrote:

Dunno about CSI folks, but I've worked in two labs: Research Clinical
Pathology at a major cancer research hospital and the exploration and
production labs at the world's largest facility for studying the
origin and migration of petroleum.

"Taste" is a fairly common diagnostic tool - sometimes, admittedly,
by accident as you mouth-pipette various substances such as urine,
liquefied feces, pus, and so on.

Wow. Almost thirty years later, I still remember getting reamed, as a
second-year chemistry major, by the proctor in the Organic lab for
doing just
that: "NEVER PIPETTE BY MOUTH!! YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT'S IN THERE!"

Oh, bother.

If you didn't know what was "in there," why were you fooling with it? 99% of
the time you could simply look at the label on the bottle!

There's best practices and expedient practices. Most of the time,
"expedient" trumps "best."

I don't know of anything that would kill you if you simply LOOKED at it, but
there are a number of things that are lethal if sniffed. Did you proctor
have a fit when people smelled things?

As a point of historical note, before sophisticated tests, physicians used
to diagnose diabetes by tasting the patient's urine.