The Right Chemistry: Arsenic has exacted a deadly price, by accident and by design

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It was July 1905, and the mammal house at the Bronx Zoo was full of flies. The reason? A heat wave had hit New York and flies multiply faster when it’s hot. While fly eggs normally hatch into maggots in about 20 hours, in hot climates this can be cut in half. The lifespan of a fly is only about three weeks, but in that period a female can lay around 900 eggs. Not surprisingly, flies swarmed the animals and visitors in the hot, humid building that housed a variety of mammals. Something had to be done!

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Dr. Blair, the zoo’s veterinarian, settled on flypaper, of which there were two types available: dangling strips of paper coated with glue to catch unlucky flies that landed on it, and paper infused with sugar and arsenite. of sodium designed to be immersed in a container. of water. Flies would be attracted to the sugar and sent to heaven by the arsenic. Blair thought the latter would fit the bill. However, there was a problem. Submerging in the arsenic-laced water was not always fatal, and some flies soaked in the poisonous solution managed to find their way into the animal cages. As a result, the caretaker who opened the mammal house the next morning was faced with a terrible scene. Two foxes, a kangaroo, an armadillo, a guinea pig and an opossum lay dead. A sun bear and an anteater convulsed. Autopsies confirmed that the animals had been poisoned with arsenic, probably by eating dead flies.

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Accidental poisoning of animals with arsenic is one thing. Accidentally killing 21 people and sickening more than 200 is quite another. That, however, is exactly what “Humbug Billy” did in Bradford, England, in 1858. William Hardaker did not earn his nickname by selling nonsense. Billy was selling “humbugs,” a traditional British mint-flavored candy with distinctive colored stripes. He didn’t make the candy himself. He usually bought them from Joseph Neal, a local candy producer. The basic ingredient of sausages, as in all sweets, is sugar. Today it is a cheap commodity, but in Victorian England, sugar had to be imported by ship from the West Indies at great cost. So it was not uncommon for unscrupulous merchants like Neal to spread sugar with some cheap substitute like plaster.

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Neal sent a courier to a pharmacy to buy plaster. Unfortunately, the pharmacist’s assistant made a terrible mistake, reaching into the wrong container and dispensing arsenic trioxide instead. Pharmacies used to stock arsenic as rat poison and also sold plaster (calcium sulfate) which was used to make plaster casts for broken bones. They are both white powders, so the error was not immediately apparent. Hardaker noticed that the texture of the candy wasn’t quite right and got Neal to accept a discount. Twenty-one people died and about 200 fell ill a day after inadvertently buying the adulterated hoaxes. Neal, the pharmacist and his assistant were charged with involuntary manslaughter but were ultimately acquitted. The courts ruled that there was no malicious intent.

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This whole sordid affair had a positive consequence. It was a contributing factor in the passage of the Pharmacy Act of 1868, which restricted the way potentially poisonous substances were sold. Strychnine, cyanide, ergot, opium and arsenic could only be sold if the seller knew the buyer’s intended purpose and they had to be sold in containers bearing the pharmacist’s name and address.

Unintentionally poisoning people with arsenic is one thing, doing it intentionally is quite another. The Borgias, perhaps the most famous crime family in history, liked to kill enemies with arsenic during the Italian Renaissance, and in the 17th century, professional poisoner Giulia Toffana was happy to provide arsenic-based “Aqua Toffana” to women who wanted to do without their abusive husbands. Less well known are the antics of Zsuzsanna Fazekas, a Hungarian midwife, who followed in the footsteps of Madam Toffana.

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As World War I approached, Nagyrev’s men were sent to the front lines. They left behind wives, many of whom had been locked in unhappy arranged marriages with no possibility of divorce in a Catholic country. Then chance intervened. During the war, remote Nagyrev became a waiting place for prisoners of war who were free to roam the city and indulge the local women. Having tasted a better life, these women were unwilling to welcome their often abusive husbands home. Madame Fazekas offered a choice. She was quite willing to teach the women how to extract arsenic from fly paper and use it to kill undesirable members of the family.

Soon there was a virtual epidemic of deaths in the city, and in 1929 the authorities were suspicious enough to exhume dozens of corpses. The tests confirmed the presence of arsenic. The “Angel Makers”, as the women would be called, were responsible for some 40 deaths.

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Twenty-six of the Angel Makers were arrested and eight were sentenced to death. Fazekas, suspected of having poisoned her own husband before reaching Nagyrev, was not one of them. When she saw the writing on the wall, she boiled a dose of fly paper and sat down to eat her last meal just as the gendarmes approached her house.

There has been talk of turning that house into a museum dedicated to arsenic. The idea is that tourists would be attracted just like flies are attracted to flypaper.

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Joe Schwarcz is director of the Office of Science and Society at McGill University (mcgill.ca/oss). He hosts The Dr. Joe Show on CJAD Radio 800 AM every Sunday from 3-4 p.m.