Tony,
Some weighty trivia.
Lead was known to man as early as 4,000 BC. Both the
Egyptians and Hebrews used lead and the Phoenicians
mined lead ore in Spain around 2,000 BC. The earliest
written accounts of lead toxicity have been found in
Egyptian papyrus scrolls. According to them, lead compounds
were often used for homicidal purposes. Hippocrates,
in 370 BC, was probably the ®rst to describe lead
colic, without however recognizing the etiology. The ®rst to
describe lead palsy was Nicander in the 2nd century BC, but
he too was not able to attribute the palsy to lead exposure.
But in the 1st century AD Dioscorides saw the connection
between lead exposure and toxic manifestations, and Pliny
stated that lead poisoning was common in shipbuilding. The
Romans produced an average of 60,000 tonnes of lead a year
for 400 years. They used lead compounds for glazing
pottery, and metallic lead for cooking utensils and piping.
They also used to boil and condense grape juice in lead
pots for preserving and sweetening of wine. Lead poisoning
from all these sources must have been common in ancient
Rome. The poisoning was epidemic and is said to have
caused many stillbirths, deformities and cases of brain
damage. Considering that lead also reduces fecundity, it
has been suggested that widespread lead poisoning,
selectively affecting the patricians who drank much
wine and had access to plumbing, contributed to the
decadence and later the fall of the Roman Empire
[Gil®llan, 1965]. Indeed, high lead concentrations have
been found in archeological Roman bones; higher in bones
retrieved from patrician tombs than in those found in
plebeian graves.
Although both lead poisoning and its connection to lead
exposure were known in late Antiquity, this disease was
almost completely forgotten in the literature preserved from
the Middle Ages. This is astonishing, because lead was
widely used both for industrial, domestic, and medicinal
purposes. For example, lead acetate (``lead sugar'') was
used as a sweetener of wine and ciders, and it caused severe
epidemics of poisoning. In some German countries the
problem was so severe that death penalty was prescribed,
®rst in 1498 and later in 1577, for those caught mixing lead
sugar into wine. Also mixing lead compounds into (socalled)
medicinal preparations helped many patients to a
better world more quickly than ``normally.'' Industrially
lead and its compounds gained more and more use at the
beginning of the New Age, for example, in pottery,
piping, shipbuilding, window making, the arms industry,
pigments, and later book printing. Lead poisoning became
a plague in Europe and later in America during the 15th,
16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. However, it was not until
in the 16th century that lead poisoning reappeared in the
medical literature in Paracelsus' description of what he
called ``the miner's disease.'' In the beginning of the
18th century Ramazzini wrote that potters who worked
with lead became ``paralytic, splenetic, lethargic, cachectic,
and toothless, so that one rarely sees a potter whose
face is not cadaverous and has the color of lead