What's Your Poison? Again

In What's Your Poison? I told of my grandmother's experience of being poisoned by a 'medication' given to her in the 1890's and of the poisoned beer catastrophe of 1900.

A little earlier in the century, journalists Charles Manby Smith and James Greenwood wrote on similar themes. They were writing at a time when dreadful epidemics were raging in Britain's teeming cities. Cholera, with victims vomiting and shitting themselves to a nasty dehydrated death, was especially feared.

It was a time when there was no systematic, scientific, way of approaching this kind of phenomenon. A lot of heavy duty thinking and investigating around the subject was going on but unfortunately for cholera victims the approach of the professionals was going into a blind alley, involving smells, or miasma, as they called them. This had been adopted as the official view. So it was that the findings of Dr John Snow's investigation, which had correctly identified water pollution as the source of infection, were long ignored. 

 This could be characterised in tabloid terms as baddy establishment overrides humble local doctor/campaigner. But we must remember that they were groping their way step by step into the unknown, piecing stuff together which, over the following century, would build into the knowledge which is our salvation now. In that scenario, why not believe that foetid, poo-smelling atmospheres are the carriers of disease? Having said that, Edwin Chadwick, the guy who set up the miasma legislation, was an odd and very pushy man, not given to tolerating the ideas of others.

 Even the concept of having government departments and inspectors to deal with health was only just getting established – against the usual tide of opposition. 

This cartoon, published in McLean’s monthly sheet of caricatures; March 1, 1832, sends up the new Board of Health inspectors.

 James Greenwood tells us that, struggling to come up with measures to control the disease, some authorities recommended the moderate drinking of alcohol as a preventive. The pub trade, he says, was eager to help:

A West-End Cholera Stronghold*

(*This paper was written during the last visitation of this terrible epidemic.)

 There never were such roaring times for a poor neighbourhood publican. He is never the poorer for a cholera visitation, for although his trade in beer at such periods is lamentably injured, it has always been the fashion to recommend brandy as an anti-choleriac, and under the management of the knowing proprietor of the Pig and Whistle a quartern of brandy may be made to yield as much profit as four retailed pots of beer, and so the matter was as nearly as possible equalised. But with this season's visitation of the scourge a new fashion in drinks has been introduced. “The safest and simplest drink during the prevalence of the epidemic is a mild compound of good rum and pure water, taken in moderation”, is the formula promulgated by certain well-meaning M.D.s, furnishing a hint not likely to be thrown away, either by the landlord of the Pig and Whistle or his dram-drinking customers, who, so long as they are permitted to guzzle until they are drunk, are quite indifferent as to the means employed. So I found matters in a dirty tavern in Hare Street, [where] a puncheon of “fine old vatted rum” was under-labelled in great chalk letters “Cholera Mixture” 

Let's now go behind the bar with the other journalist, Charles Manby Smith:

 The Drink Doctor

Mr Quintin Quassia, D.D., as the gin-spinners and beer-druggers who require his services gravely address him ... is a member of no learned profession, and is in possession of no degree, save a very considerable degree of quiet impudence and self-possession ... Under his miraculous management three hogsheads of proof gin from the distillers shall be in the course of a single night become transformed into seven substantial hogsheads of "Cream of the Valley". He has the assistance of a redoubtable necromancer in the person of Father Thames, whom he secretly invokes from his oozy bed at his beck at the dead of night.

'Father Thames', in a contemporary cartoon. 

Bear in mind that we now know, and Dr Snow at the time suspected, that 'Father Thames's' water was responsible for the cholera; that it had so much reeking stinking ordure bobbing about in it that Parliament had to move out of Westminster because of the unbearable smell - the Great Stink of 1858.

Watered gin would of course be insipid (unless there were a turd floating in it) and easily detected. Other additions were therefore used to put some taste back. Large amounts of sugar were added; an additional 'benefit' of sugar was the excitement of thirst so that, having finished one drink, the drinker was inclined to buy another.

But strong spirits require a 'kick', so something else was required:

'He has also ... another liquid spirit at his beck – a spirit whose touch is torture, and whose function frequently is to burn what fire will not consume – the fiend of sulphuric acid, whose vulgar retail name is vitriol ... he carries poisons of terrible efficacy, and thirst exciting drugs to consummate his work.'

So: alcohol for the feel-good + water to increase profit + sulphuric acid to provide a kick when you swallow + sugar to make you want more + help to ward off cholera! Perfect, let's have another!

I suspect that, if asked, the drinkers of this stuff would say they preferred it to straight unadulterated gin, the taste having become associated with the euphoria provided by the alcohol. This thinking was certainly apparent among the drinkers of low quality beer at the beginning of the 20th Century, as reported by James C. Whorton in his book, The Arsenic Century. This stuff had never seen malt, its alcohol being derived from any available vegetable source, with added colouring and flavours. After the arsenic poisoning disaster of 1900 , when some brewers produced beer guaranteed to be made of authentic ingredients, many drinkers expressed disappointment at the taste compared with the fake stuff they had been drinking. 

It was the same with my uncle John (my gran's eldest son) in the 1970's. A dedicated six to eight pints a night man, he knew his stuff about beer. He could tell you all about the good breweries and the not-so-good, and all about those landlords who kept a good pint and those who didn't. Then, in the 1970's the British brewing industry panicked about its future in the modern world, industrialised its production methods, changed its recipes and reduced the product to a low quality generic fizzy drink. And Uncle John went right on drinking it and talking the same talk. Worse: in those years there was a bit of a craze for brewing your own, using kits bought from supermarkets or chemist shops. He went in for that, big time. The product was execrable. But at 5% abv who cares? He certainly didn't as he threw copious amounts of it down his neck. Many men were the same. I think it was a case of that well known rule of thumb: after the third pint it all tastes good.

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Notes:

There's a succinct article here about cholera in London, and the róles of John Snow and Edwin Chadwick:

http://www.choleraandthethames.co.uk/cholera-in-london/cholera-in-westminster/

Charles Manby Smith wrote for the popular magazines of the day. In 1853 he republished a collection of his articles in a book entitled Curiosities of London Life, and this has been republished in the Victorian London Ebooks series with an introduction by Lee Jackson. It's a great read, an immersion in the lives of real people in mid-Victorian times. The passages quoted in this post come from this edition. 

My James Greenwood extracts come from his book, The Wilds of London, published in 1874, also republished in the Victorian Ebooks series and also with an introduction by Lee Jackson.

I got the Board of Trade Inspectors cartoon here:

https://collections.nlm.nih.gov/catalog/nlm:nlmuid-101393365-img