This is a link to an article that gives a great account of lead in the Roman Empire https://www.epa.gov/archive/epa/aboutepa/lead-poisoning-historical-perspective.html.

But back to my post.

Lead is the oldest and best known of environmental hazards. For over two millennia, overexposure to lead was known to cause hallucinations and severe mental problems.

The ancients regarded lead as the father of all metals, but the deity they associated with the substance was Saturn, the ghoulish titan who devoured his own young. The very word “saturnine,” in its most specific meaning, applies to an individual whose temperament has become uniformly gloomy, cynical, and taciturn as the results of lead intoxication.

During the Middle Ages, skeptics who did not believe in “spirits” were frequently referred to the lead mines to see for themselves the way the miners behaved. Early works on tradesmen’s diseases usually note, as did Bernardo Ramazzini in 1700, that: “The skin [of lead workers] is apt to bear the same color of the metal … Demons and ghosts are often found to disturb the miners.”

And miners are not celibate for the most part. Before it was realised that dust on miner’s clothing could poison their families, lead poisoning in miners’ offspring prompted this anonymous poem by a roman hermit and translated by Humelbergius Secundus in 1829:

Hence gout and stone afflict the human race;
Hence lazy jaundice with her saffron face;
Palsy, with shaking head and tott’ring knees.
And bloated dropsy, the staunch sot’s disease;
Consumption, pale, with keen but hollow eye,
And sharpened feature, shew’d that death was nigh.
The feeble offspring curse their crazy sires,
And, tainted from his birth, the youth expires.

The results of lead poisoning, in woman in a lead mill (mill for grinding white lead for paint) was related by Charles Dickens:

I saw a horrible brown heap on the floor in the corner, which, but for previous experience in this dismal wise, I might not have suspected to be ‘the bed.’ There was something thrown upon it and I asked what it was. ‘Tis the poor craythur that stays here, sur; and ‘tis very bad she is, ‘tis very bad shes been this long time, and ‘tis better she’ll never be … and ‘tis the lead, sur.’ ‘The what?’ ‘The lead, sur. Sure, ‘tis the lead-mills, where women gets took on at 18 pence a day, sur, when they makes application early enough, and is lucky and wanted; and ‘tis lead pisoned she is, sur, and some of them gets lead pisoned soon, and some of them gets lead pisoned later, and some but not many, niver; and ‘tis all according to the constitooshun, sur, and some constitooshuns is strong, and some is weak, and her constitooshun is lead pisoned, bad as can be, sur3 … ‘

We might be a bit more careful now, but the main problem that has remained is that there is no wide-spread recognition that lead accumulates in the body or indeed that it is really really dangerous in the long term, even at low concentrations.

If I had to pick a single reason why the true dangers of lead aren’t widely recognised today, it would have to be the huge effort of the Ethyl Corporation (who made tetraethyl lead for leaded petrol) to deny that lead was dangerous. The Ethyl Corporation sponsored doctors and scientists over a period of nearly 60 years to spread the word that lead was safe, despite almost overwhelming evidence that it most certainly wasn’t. Generations of doctors were told that lead was safe and that sort of propaganda becomes an urban truth that is hard to overcome. Then again we had the lead indtry cartel in Queensland that was actively promoting the safety of lead and attacking anyone who said otherwise.

I’m not sure that cartel isn’t still around. I suspect they might be.

The Centers for Disease Control have stated that no level of lead is safe, and yet we are where we are today, still with no effective way applied to minimise the risks of lead.

I’d also point out that our Health services don’t show many signs they take lead seriously, except when someone has had such severe exposure that they might die.