5 ms·
On one 1800s death certificate, the cause of death was listed as "drank Paris Green accidentally." "What's Paris Green?" I asked an older family member. "Inse
by ilamont 6y ago
On one 1800s death certificate, the cause of death was listed as "drank Paris Green accidentally."
"What's Paris Green?" I asked an older family member.
"Insecticide" was was the reply. It's also a pigment once used in fireworks. Extremely toxic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_green https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_green
What a terrible way to die.
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago>What a terrible way to die. This is the 1800s we're talking about, a time when people routinely died from infections and sepsis. Organ failure over a couple days is a walk in the park by comparison. Yeah they both look like crap from a comfy 21st century office chair in an air conditioned building but so does practically every other reality of 19th century life.
- meepmorp 6y ago> Organ failure over a couple days is a walk in the park by comparison The symptoms of acute arsenic poisoning are vomiting and severe diarrhea, severe stomach pain, convulsions and muscle cramps. Your hair falls out, you vomit and piss blood, then after a few days, you fall into a coma and die. Doesn't sound markedly better than sepsis.
- gumby 6y agoNote also that that could be a euphemism (or simply a cause of) suicide. As suicide was considered a sin (and also often considered scandalous by the surviving family) it was rarely mentioned on death certificates. Sort of like the precipitous decline of alcohol-related deaths during prohibition: clearly prohibition must have prevented (or delayed!) some alcohol-related death, but out of respect for the family another cause of death was commonly used instead during that period.
- nitrogen 6y agoNote also that that could be a euphemism (or simply a cause of) suicide. As suicide was considered a sin (and also often considered scandalous by the surviving family) it was rarely mentioned on death certificates. Interestingly in modern times, at least in conservative areas, sometimes police/coroners will label an accidental self-hanging as suicide, as that's less embarrassing to the family than the reality.
- fridif 6y agoWhy not just list the cause of death as "accident", instead of "accidental self hanging" (embarrassing and needlessly specific), and also instead of "suicide" (since it wasnt their intent to kill themselves)
- autoexec 6y ago"accident" doesn't tell you anything about what caused their death. They could have been hit by a car, stepped on by an elephant, electrocuted in the bathtub etc. They'd be better off ignoring if it were intentional or accidental and just listing what killed them like asphyxiation, heart failure, etc although that can have problems too since life insurance may or may not pay out without knowing if it was suicide
- vmception 6y agoI would just assume it was a euphemism for suicide
- thechao 6y agoMisadventure is my favorite euphemism.
- DanBC 5y agoDepending where you are, misadventure isn't really a euphemism. In England: Suicide means the deceased did something to end their life, and had the intention of ending their life when they did it. Misadventure means the deceased did a risky thing and died, but did not have the intention of dying when they did it. Accident means the deceased was doing a normal activity and died. Definitions of the manner of death can be nice and clear on paper, but are much harder to apply to the situations of a person's death, so there's lots of overlap between suicide and misadventure. It's often difficult to show intent, and so those deaths sometimes get called misadventure, or they have a narrative conclusion.
- IncRnd 6y agoUntil I read the part about "insecticide" I thought that might have referred to drinking too much of the Green Fairy. After all, absinthe was banned there.
- permo-w 6y agothat would have been my guess too
- hinkley 6y agoIt was also used as a pigment. They made it for paint. I believe when I learned about Paris Green, in some documentary, it was mentioned that it was also briefly used for consumer goods. My association of Paris Green is a picture of a rich green notebook cover and the narrator saying that scholars have to wear gloves to read its contents. Name of the Rose vibe going on there, but the theory is that it was used to keep rodents from chewing on the books. Also if you're collecting old books, be careful of the green ones. It seems they started with Paris Green in the 1600's but continued using arsenic for green colors all the way into the 20th century: https://daily.jstor.org/some-books-can-kill/ https://daily.jstor.org/some-books-can-kill/
- saalweachter 6y agoIt was also a really, really, bad idea to use your mouth to put a fine point on your paintbrushes throughout history.
- hinkley 6y agoI have some recollection of a paint that used uranium, but the current front runner for me is Naples Yellow, which is three lead, one antimony, and four oxygen atoms. Definitely don’t lick that brush.
- mns 6y agoMy aunt and uncle both died of this, together with around 5 or 6 more people in the early 90s when one of their neighbors, an old lady, baked a cake for a birthday and mistakenly used Paris Green. She managed to poison all these people and, none survived, while she didn’t manage to have any of the cake and lived. Wanted to see if I can find anything online about this, but there’s not much saved from newspapers in Bucharest, Romania from that time.
- amelius 6y agoIs anything with arsenic in it ever not toxic?
- carlmr 6y agoArsenobetaine: https://www.cdc.gov/biomonitoring/Arsenic_FactSheet.html https://www.cdc.gov/biomonitoring/Arsenic_FactSheet.html
- permo-w 6y agoIf I’d been forced to guess what Paris Green was, I would have gone with Absinthe