"During the Victorian era, there was a fashion for a certain shade of dye: a vibrant emerald whose invention sparked a craze for green dresses, green wallpaper, artificial greenery of all kinds. The catch was: it was highly toxic, a mix of copper and arsenic trioxide. Factory girls died of it, foaming green at the mouth; their eyes and fingernails, stomach, lungs, all green. A woman who wore a ballgown of 'Scheele's green' carried enough arsenic in her skirts to kill everyone in any room she ever cared to enter. Four or five grains of arsenic is enough to fell a grown man; over the course of an evening, sixty grains might powder off a dress and onto the floor."
Cal Flyn, Islands of Abandonment - Life in the Post-Human Landscape.
4 comments:
Ooh I'd heard of this, but didn't realize it was that bad. Crazy!!
Unbelievable, isn't it? It's like walking around with a vial of smallpox or something tossing it in your hand... But Elizabethans painting their skin with lead to look pale & then there's lead in pipes, paint & petrol. Plus asbestos...! Oh & before Uranium became 'useful' for building bombs, they used it as a glazing agent for crockery....!! I've seen people run a Geiger counter over it. The counter goes CRAZY! But I bet the food on it keeps... [lol]
Absolutely insane, isn't it? They had no idea how dangerous it was. Have you read Radium Girls?
Haven't read it - but I do know of it and them. They did something similar with the match girls & phosphorus. People are DUMB.
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