In its perverse way, arsenic was a perverse triumph of unregulated, free-market economics.ĭr. Sadly, despite the evident dangers arsenic posed to Victorian Britons, regulation to protect health was painfully slow in coming in this age of laissez faire capitalism and governmental indifference. Arsenic was used even in medications to treat everything from asthma and cancer to reduced libido and skin problems. By the 1830s, morbid descriptions of murders with arsenic terrified the public and became a staple of the British popular press.īut most of the fatalities from arsenic were more pedestrian: from accidental use in food or from exposure to arsenical compounds in consumer goods such as fabric dyes and wallpapers, in facilities that made these products, and in the polluted air.
Arsenic also was odorless and tasteless and easily confused with flour or sugar and other cooking essentials. A by-product of an emerging smelting industry, arsenic was cheap and readily available as a rat killer by the early 1800s. Arsenic pervaded almost every aspect of life in nineteenth century Britain, leaving a toll of death and illness.
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