The Truth About Arsenic in the Victorian Era

Hello everyone, and welcome! Today's topic is one that is so incredibly interesting. You see, arsenic is something that most of us have heard about in terms of its use as a fashionable item in the 19th century. We tend to hear about arsenic green wallpapers, or arsenic green fabrics, and how deadly they were, and how many people they made sick, and how people continued to use them as fashionable items for so long, even though they knew how bad they were, and how could they possibly have done that? Well, it's actually incredibly complicated and incredibly interesting. You see, a couple years ago, I was doing research for my thesis looking at medicine and health in the 19th century, and I came across a modern article that talked about arsenic during that time, and some of the myths that we have about it, and some of the things that you may not have known, which I certainly didn't know a lot of these things, and so I finally have had the chance to sit down, flesh out my knowledge on arsenic and its use as a fashionable item in the 19th century, and I get to share so much of that with you. So hold on, it's gonna be a wild ride. First, we're going to start by trying to understand what arsenic actually is, and then we'll get into how and why it became fashionable, and all of the other crazy stuff. So arsenic itself is a chemical element. It's most often found in compounds with sulfur or minerals, and that is where it starts to become hazardous to humans. One of the ways that arsenic is incredibly dangerous is by way of ingesting it, whether it's through water or foods. If it's in the soil, it can make its way into plants that we then eat, so it's something that is incredibly, incredibly concerning still to this day, in no small part because arsenic was actually regularly used as a pesticide for centuries, and continued to be used well through the 20th century. So it's not something that is in the past, it's something that is a current issue. Now that isn't to say that arsenic doesn't have some purpose. In addition to pesticides, arsenic was also regularly used in medicine. This dates all the way back to the classical period, but it really took off in the late 18th century with Fowler's solution. That was something that was encouraged to be used on skin diseases, and it does actually work as an antiseptic, so in some ways it helps, but also arsenic and skin really don't mix, so they kind of negated that. However, there are some modern purposes that it is still useful for. In a slightly different adjusted state, we still use it for leukemia today, so it actually helps to reduce white blood cell count. So it doesn't mean that arsenic is a completely bad thing, it does have some uses, it's just something that is incredibly difficult to One of the reasons why it makes tracking arsenic and its uses so terribly confusing is the fact that arsenic tends to interact with the body by producing inflammation. So depending on what way you were exposed to it, different parts of your body may deal with inflammation. And inflammation can basically be anything and everything in terms of symptoms. So it might just be a headache, or you might be tired, or stomach ache, or digestive problems, or skin irritations, or trouble breathing, or sneezing and stuffiness, or just generally feeling meh. Things that if you looked them up today as symptoms, you could be sick with almost anything. So it's not terribly easy to track arsenic exposure, arsenic poisoning in humans. Another one of its very early uses was that of poison. Now if we go far enough back, the way that arsenic was usually available was either as yellow orpiment or as red realgar, and both of those are sulfur-based compounds. So they both smell and taste pretty terrible, and they're very colorful. So they were not terribly effective as poison simply because it was really obvious. But they were still used occasionally as makeup and pigments, say in ancient Egypt, but they were somewhat sparingly used and certainly didn't live up to the reputation that arsenic does in the 19th century. One of the major changes for arsenic as a poison, though, occurred in the 8th century, and that is when they discovered arsinious acid, which is better known as white arsenic. And it's simply a colorless, tasteless, odorless little crystal powder that therefore was pretty wonderful as a poison. The Medicis used it in great amounts to get rid of their rivals and some family members. Supposedly Napoleon was also poisoned by arsenic, although there's plenty of evidence that shows that the arsenic that was found in his hair is actually at the same level of many other people from that time period, so the arsenic levels he was dealing with likely were not fatal to him, though he might have had some symptoms from it. So it's not likely he was poisoned, just simply exposed. The only downside to using white arsenic as a poison was that it has a very grainy texture and it is not terribly water soluble, so even if it was put into a drink or a food, there was still a sort of salty graininess to it that very often gave it away. And that's mentioned in so many court cases throughout the centuries. So how exactly did something that was used as a pesticide or a medicine or as a poison end up being so incredibly desirable and fashionable and found all over the home if we knew it was a poison? Well this starts to really change in the late 18th century. Greens are certainly possible prior to that point, but they aren't nearly as bright and vibrant as what we think of as arsenic green. They are made by way of blue and yellow dyes being overlaid or by use of viridian, which is a little bit more of a teal type green, but in the late 18th century this starts to change. One of the inventions is that of cobalt green, and that occurs in 1780. Now this green does not involve arsenic and is much safer, however it's very expensive and it has a low tint level, meaning that it takes a lot of pigment to actually get a bright and vibrant color. So it didn't quite take off as much as shiel's green, which was invented in 1778, and Shiel discovered a very bright, vibrant, inexpensive, and highly pigmented, and very colorfast green. And it sort of fits in that range somewhere from a very bright grass green to a mint green, not unlike the shirt that I'm wearing today. This green is specifically a copper arsenite, and we'll very often refer to it as shiel's green, or mineral green, or occasionally you'll see it as arsenic green, but that's where it gets a little bit complicated. There's actually more than one arsenic green. In 1814, Schweinfurt managed to come up with a new version of arsenic green, which was a copper acetoarsenite. So slightly different compound, slightly different green. We consider this more of an emerald green. It was very commonly referred to as Paris green, sometimes parrot green, or Vienna, or all sorts of other different cities. There were slight variations on the exact green tone, but it is a slightly darker and more rich and vibrant green than shiel's green. So there is now a whole range of very bright greens that could possibly be arsenic, though there are plenty of other inventions during the 19th century that start to replace it as well. You also have copper arsenate green, which comes into play in the 19th century, and that one I found particularly interesting because I realized that it was actually still being used as a pesticide in woods into the 21st century. So if you remember any sort of playgrounds from your youths, especially those of you who are a little bit older, having sort of a green tinge to the wood, that was copper arsenate, and it was only banned in the US in 2003. So there are still plenty of wood structures like playgrounds and decks that still have that in use. Now, don't freak out, just don't go licking wood outside and wash your hands if you play on it, which I kind of feel like should be something you do anyway. However, a lot of these colors started to be replaced in the 19th century, as I mentioned. One of the great examples for this comes in 1859, and that is viridian green. Guinier managed to come up with a very vibrant and bright and colorfast green, which did not need to use arsenic and was much, much safer. So it quickly started to replace arsenic as an option for green. Other dyes like malachite or emeraldine, which is an aniline dye, also were invented during the 19th century, and they started to spread and replace arsenic as well. So then, if we came up with a replacement so quickly, why is it that we still managed to find arsenic being a common issue throughout the 19th and into the 20th centuries when it comes to fashionable items? There's a few very good reasons for that, one of which is that it was in so many things. The list is incredibly extensive. We expect to find it in wallpaper and fabric, but you will also find it in leather. So you'll find it in gloves and shoes and shoe linings, and you'll find it in fake flowers or books or candies. Yes, it was commonly used as a food dye. You'll also see it in lampshades and feathers and stockings and candles, and so, so many fashionable items throughout people's lives and homes. The issue from this comes from the fact that most of these objects create a fine dust. It's very hard to make sure that a paper or a textile or a leather has absolutely nothing shed off of it. This is especially true when you're dealing with things like flocked wallpapers. Flocking is a very soft, velvety texture, and if you rub it, it will start to come off. So you've now essentially created an arsenic dust in the air, and that is what is incredibly hazardous and can cause people to become very ill or even die if they are overexposed to breathing in that dust. So wallpapers were considered incredibly dangerous when they had arsenic in them. The reason why you will still find them in homes throughout the 19th century, however, is the fact that a great deal of the argument was that it depended on the quality of the wallpaper. So they knew that wallpaper shedding color could be potentially dangerous, but theoretically a good quality wallpaper won't dust off. It will retain its color, it will retain its pigment, and it will be colorfast and safe and glazed over and you don't have to worry about it at all. So a lot of people were taken in by this idea that they just had to make sure that they bought quality goods, not cheap goods, and that's a mindset that we still deal with in terms of toxicity issues today. So people were being told that their wallpaper was safe because they bought the expensive wallpaper. This was one of the arguments that William Morris had, who was a very famous interior designer of the era, and a great many of his wallpapers had arsenic in them. And upon being approached about this, a lot of his quotes were to the effect of, but we can make it safe, and there's so many other things that are unsafe in the world, why are we focusing on arsenic? Which is true. There were a lot of things in the 19th century that could kill you or make you sick, and arsenic was just one of many. But perhaps we should have been addressing all of them rather than none of them. But still, I see his point. When it came to textiles, the biggest issue was when they were directly exposed to the skin. So you very often saw stories about stockings or slipper linings, gloves, collars, things that were directly up against the skin that were causing rashes and very direct issues to the exterior of the body. So that made it a little more obvious as to what was causing it, and you just simply had to not wear that item anymore. Seems like a fairly simple thing. Kind of. One of the other major issues that regularly gets quoted is that of fake flowers. As fake flowers were very often placed in the bonnet, on a hat, and sat above the head using green colorant in the stems and the leaves, meant that if it slowly started to deteriorate and dust off of the paper or the silk, it would then just simply rain down in front of someone's face, and they would inevitably breathe in the particulate as well. So that was a very direct way to end up with arsenic exposure that followed you around all day long. So you would start to think that it would be really obvious. Every time I wear this bonnet, I feel sick. Every time I wear these gloves, my hands break out. Every time I'm in this room, I don't feel well. But here's where it starts to get really complicated. One, arsenic poisoning isn't immediate. It can be half an hour to an hour, even in some cases multiple hours, before the person would start to feel the effects. Two, what arsenic was in was actually pretty mysterious. Here's the thing. We think of arsenic green. We don't think about red or yellow or blue or black. Or white. But in reality, arsenic was used in everything, not just green. So those yellow gloves could have arsenic in them as a mordant, meaning that once the item is dyed a certain color, you use a mordant to make the dye actually stick and stay colorfast, not wash off or rub off. And arsenic was a great mordant. So it was used in potentially anything that has been dyed, whether it's fur or feathers or silk or cotton. Turkey red cotton apparently very commonly had arsenic in it. Not at all green. And so they were finding that arsenic was in so many different things. It was also used as a preservative in animal-based glues or starches. So your white starched collar or potentially even the sizing and glue that you were putting up your wallpaper with. So your wallpaper could be arsenic-free, but the paste wasn't. So it could be in anything and everything. And it gets incredibly complicated incredibly quickly when you can no longer pinpoint it to a very small group of items. One of my favorite finds during my research was this book, Bitten by Witch Fever, and that is by Lucinda Hawksley. And it goes through and shows hundreds of different samples of wallpaper that have all tested positive for arsenic. And some of these colors you wouldn't expect. You find reds and browns and blues and all sorts of beautiful colors that are not arsenic green, but could be just as dangerous. So that makes it very complicated very fast for the people of the 19th century to be able to know what could even potentially have arsenic. Add into the fact that a lot of things were sold as arsenic-free when they weren't. Because guess what? There weren't regulations on this in most places, at least not until well into the 19th century, and for some countries not until the 20th century. It wasn't even until 1836 that we could test for arsenic presence in different objects. So it wouldn't have made any sense to necessarily put laws into place prior to that because there was no way for us to know if there was actually arsenic present in anything. So it wasn't until the 1850s and 60s where you start to see countries banning the use of arsenic, whether it's specifically in foods or overall usage. Bavaria, Prussia, and France were some of the earliest countries to do so. France pretty much outright banned it from almost everything or put very very low level limits on everything as of 1861. However, England and the U.S. were pretty far behind on this, despite some horrifying incidents. In 1858, England experienced what they later called the Bradford Candy Incident, where a candy maker grabbed white arsenic powder instead of plaster of Paris in order to make a large quantity of candy, making hundreds of children sick and causing a few deaths. Even with this horrifying situation, England still drug its heels in terms of actually implementing any rules or regulations. It wasn't until 1875 that the Sale of Food and Drugs Act was actually put into place in the UK, which was finally a regulation that was effective enough to be enforced. Previous versions were not very effective and did very little to actually prevent the use of arsenic in foods. Now you will note this is specific to foods. This has nothing to do with wallpapers or textiles or candles or anything other than what you were actually supposed to be eating. So arsenic can still be in plenty of other things, just not food. The first law in the U.S. was actually specifically just in Massachusetts and it limited arsenic usage in just about everything, gave specific numbers depending on what type of thing it was, whether it was paper or fabric or specifically meant for clothing. And so Massachusetts actually set this up as a regulation. The U.S. still pretty far behind that. They did present in 1906 the Food and Drugs Act. However, it kind of went back and forth in the government for a while. Didn't really get very far. Shocking. And wasn't actually properly enacted until 1938. So there really wasn't regulation on arsenic or really any other potentially dangerous or deadly type of chemical in food or drugs until 1938 in the U.S. On top of this, those regulations only can do so much because it actually requires things to be tested. And as we said, things being sold as arsenic-free were not actually arsenic-free. So who's going around doing this testing? Who's checking on these items? In 1901, a study done on hundreds of different items looked at arsenic levels in objects that were being theoretically regulated. They found arsenic levels in lots of different things well over the legal limit. But there was really no one to enforce this. There was really no one to go out and test things. It basically required someone to rat out a very specific company and manufacturer. So they were finding plenty of arsenic in things like red stockings or black wool or turkey red cottons. They didn't really find much in greens. Weirdly enough, they didn't find anything in silk either, but it was still being found even when it was technically being regulated, which makes it pretty difficult for people going out and buying goods when the actual arsenic-free name was pretty easily falsified and there was very little being done about it. One of the other issues that I regularly heard was that there was also latent issues of arsenic, specifically in the wallpaper. Meaning that in older homes, as arsenic wallpaper had gone up but not come down, had been wallpapered over numerous times, would continue to leak arsenic gas out through the other layers of wallpaper. And people who had moved into the home not knowing what layers lurked beneath their newer wallpapers had no idea why they were feeling sick. And this is something that I had taken as fact because, well, it makes some sense. There's actually a lot of references to this gas. That article that I found a few years ago tells a different story. Testing for arsenic gas was something that they were attempting to do as of the mid-19th century, but most of those tests were terribly inconclusive and not very effective and showed very little progress. That was until 1893, when Gassio found evidence in his studies of a specific type of gas that was created from a very specific mold that could be found growing on wallpapers and inside of homes. We now know this gas as trimethylarsine, regularly termed TMA and will be for shortness from here on out. And this was the point where the myth, yes I said myth, about poisonous arsenic gas actually took hold. You see, more and more studies were done on this, but very few could show any sort of evidence. When they were doing testing on animals, very often either they were dealing with deaths due to fungal infections, because you're dealing with a lot of mold, or deaths due to carbon dioxide gas being used as the way to actually get the arsenic gas into the containers. They did some efforts in terms of raising the animals up higher because carbon dioxide does sit lower because it is a heavier gas, so theoretically you can place the animal above that level, but that's a pretty imperfect system as we know now. So there was very little evidence to show that it actually was deadly on the levels that they were producing, and it was really only established as this is a real thing in the 1930s. Frederick Challenger and his colleagues at the University of Leeds did a study specifically on trimethylarsine gas, and they too found in their studies that, oh yes, it is possible to create this gas, and it is possible for it to be deadly. In reality, their studies showed absolutely nothing conclusive. The only test subject that died was a guinea pig, and it unfortunately died at the teeth of another guinea pig, so definitely not a gas-related death. In reality, more modern studies have shown that not only is TMA something that requires a large quantity of to actually be very poisonous to people, but it's something that is very difficult to produce under the situations that would have been present for the wallpapers, in part because that specific type of mold is terribly inefficient at creating this gas and really doesn't like arsenic, so it will die really fast. Now there are plenty of other molds that will grow very well in arsenic-based situations, such as that black mold that you can find in lots of basements and places and will still make you very, very sick. Ask me how I know. The symptoms, pretty much the same as arsenic poisoning. Not fun. So it's hard to say necessarily what was actually causing the illnesses in these rooms that people were being exposed to arsenic wallpapers or arsenic fabrics or arsenic candles or anything of that nature, because they could, yes, theoretically have been very sick from arsenic specifically. They know that the dust that came off of wallpapers could be scattered about the room very easily, the dust that came off of clothing, the actual abrasion of the fabric on skin, the fact that when you go to touch something that has arsenic on it and then you go to eat with your hands, inevitably there are so many ways that arsenic could have been consumed in the 19th century that made people sick or even die from it, aside from obvious intentional poisoning incidents. However, the symptoms, the types of ways that they were testing for the causes are so imperfect and could have likely been the mold itself in the room or any number of other illnesses or sources for respiratory issues or digestive issues that came around in the 19th century. It's going to forever be impossible for us to know how many people were actually sick from arsenic versus how many were just sick from the hundreds of other causes. With that in mind, as I was doing my research into this topic over the last few weeks, I came across an 1850s jacket in a fairly bright green with an incredibly vibrant emerald silk facing. I jumped on this opportunity since I've been staring at green for weeks and I wanted to actually get a chance to look at the type of garment that might have actually been dyed with arsenic. I do have to say I did attempt to do some modern scientific tests on it to see if it does have arsenic in it or not. I had very, very low level responses to it, which was low enough level that it's probably just a me problem more so than guaranteeing that the garment has arsenic in it. However, I'm still going to treat it as potentially unsafe, but in reality all of the antique garments that I handle should also be treated as that because they could have so many other heavy metals and dangerous things in them. This is not just an arsenic problem. So all I'm really going to be doing is, as I'm handling it a great deal, I will be wearing gloves, washing my hands a lot, making sure that I've got a mask on if I'm going to be doing anything that's likely to stir up a great deal of fiber, make sure I'm in a well-ventilated space, all the usual stuff. But knowing that there are potentially all these issues, but realizing that the arsenic mania that took place in the 19th century was as much about the fact that it was an unknown, a terrifying unknown, where it could be in anything and everything. And that's something that they regularly declare to people in the 19th century, did you know it could also be in red, it could also be in yellow, it could be in your hat bands, it could be in your glues. Just the fact that they would inevitably terrify thousands of people into thinking that arsenic could be anywhere and everywhere and all of your symptoms of just simply bad health could be arsenic. It's no wonder that it's something that's stuck around in our brains as such a terrifying but vivid thing. And why arsenic green above all else sticks out because it is such a bright and vivid and clear and obvious green. And it is so fascinating and interesting to us to think, wow, these people poisoned themselves just for fashion. When in reality, it's not quite that simple. They weren't knowingly poisoning themselves, they were hoping not to, and usually very much accidentally doing so. Who knows how many of those arsenic green gowns were sold as arsenic free? Who knows how many yards and yards of wallpaper or fabric were sold as arsenic free or were simply completely different colors from what people expected and they were never the wiser. They would put them up in rooms that they weren't in very often, never having an issue. And I'm sure the same thing was true of arsenic green wallpapers and textiles too. Well, I've worn this for years. Well, I've had this up on my walls for years and I've never had an issue. And it may be true. They might have ended up with a fairly dust free wallpaper or a well-ventilated room or a room they just were never in. It took Queen Victoria years and years before she got rid of all of the arsenic wallpapers within the palace because she wasn't in most of those rooms and it wasn't until one of her guests complained of not feeling well because of the wallpaper that she went, oh, oh no, that's a thing? Let's get rid of all of those wallpapers. And granted, when that happened, lots of people followed suit because whenever the queen does something like that, you know, people take note. So it took them a while, not only to recognize how people were getting sick and the dangers they're in, but to understand what it was in. So the mania, the fear makes perfect sense. And that is in reality, what has stuck around with us. All those stories of all those people who got sick or died because supposedly of arsenic. It makes for a very, very colorful story. But like many things, when it comes to health and medicine in the 19th century, we should probably take it with a grain of salt. Just make sure that grain is not a grain of arsenic. That was a terrible ending. I'm so sorry for the bad puns. Thanks.