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Was Jack the Ripper as mad as a hatter?
Every now and then something an expert tells you sticks in your head.
Schizophrenics are NOT dangerous. They can however become very dangerous indeed in certain circumstances. However, one would normally expect there to be additional circumstance effecting that suffer. Alcohol or drugs. Today the common use of strong ‘grass’ or ‘weed’ means that mental health workers increasingly see young men and women suffering psychosis exacerbated by the drug.
Ok let’s cut to the chase. What I’m interested in is what drugs a young Jewish man might have been exposed to in the East end of 1888?
Aaron Kosminski was living in a tailoring sweat shop owned by his brother and I cant help wounding if exposure to chemicals stored in that environment might have had an effect on his mental condition.
In the sweatshop of 1850,the role of the sweater as middleman and subcontractor (or sub-subcontractor) was considered key, because he served to keep workers isolated in small workshops. This isolation made workers unsure of their supply of work, and unable to organize against their true employer through collective bargaining. Instead, tailors or other clothing retailers would subcontract tasks to the sweater, who in turn might subcontract to another sweater, who would ultimately engage workers at a piece rate for each article of clothing or seam produced. Kingsley asserted that the middleman made his profit by finding the most desperate workers, including immigrants from Ireland, women and children, who could be paid an absolute minimum. While workers who produced many pieces could earn more, less productive workers earned so little that critics termed their pay starvation wages. Employment was risky: injured or sick workers would be quickly replaced by others.
Between 1850 and 1900, sweatshops attracted the rural poor to rapidly-growing cities, and attracted immigrants to places like East London, England and New York City's garment district, located near the tenements of New York's Lower East Side. Wherever they were located, sweatshops also attracted critics and labour leaders who cited them as crowded, poorly ventilated, and prone to fires and rat infestations, since much of the work was done by many people crowded into small tenement rooms.
Avoiding a "progressive" view of history is a special challenge in the case of large technical changes that appear to define a watershed in human events -- as, for example, the "chemical revolution" of the 19th century, inaugurated by the discovery of the coal-tar dyes. The shift from natural materials to synthetic chemicals, and from craft techniques to machine processes, seems a sudden, dramatic, and complete transformation. Everything becomes a "before and after" story, as if there were no connections between the two stages, and it is easy to imagine that whatever came "after" worked better than what came "before." This interpretive tendency is exacerbated by the "magical" character of chemical reactions, particularly as they appear to people not already knowledgeable in chemistry.
Because the preindustrial, presynthetic phase of the wet processing of textiles depended upon natural ingredients, the men who practiced these arts had to know (even if not in a formal sense) as much biology as they did chemistry to understand the properties of their materials-- which came from plants, minerals, and animals. The manufacture of natural dyes required a good deal of skill, especially the more complicated dyes like indigo.
Mechanization and the factory system of production, which so altered the manufacture of cloth, also changed bleaching and dyeing--and increasingly these processes were incorporated into the factory itself. In fact, the widespread use of chemical products in cloth finishing directly followed the industrialization of textile production, reinforcing the shift from craft to factory methods.
The craft of bleaching involved repeated and complicated stages that included steeping yarn or cloth in water, scouring them in caustic solutions (usually made from wood ashes), "souring" them in buttermilk, and then exposing them to long periods of sunlight to whiten the material. In other words, it was a time-consuming and labor-intensive process. Scheele's discovery of chlorine in the late 18th century, its application to bleaching, and the subsequent industrial production of alkalis, made bleaching into a factory process and created a chemical industry whose chief customers were textile manufacturers. The use of chlorine-based bleaching powders, and later pressurized containers, substantially speeded up bleaching so that a job taking months in the 18th century could be accomplished in hours by the late-19th century. Even so, the successful use of chemical bleaching technologies still depended on a foreman's experience and skill.
Chemists had already been working along two directly relevant lines of activity. Some were investigating the properties of coal tar, a black, sticky, messy stuff left over in the production of lighting gas from coal, and from converting coal into coke. Coal tar had some medicinal qualities, but investigators noticed that it also carried colors.
Alice in Wonderland: "In that direction," the Cat said, waving its right paw around, "lives a Hatter; and in that direction," waving the other paw, "lives a March Hare. Visit either you like; they're both mad."
Harmful effects of mercury compounds. Manufacture of paints, various household items, and pesticides uses mercury; the finished product and the waste products released into air and water may contain mercury. The aquatic food chain can concentrate organic mercury compounds in fish and seafood, which, if eaten by humans, can affect the central nervous system, impairing muscle, vision, and cerebral function, leading to paralysis and sometimes death (see Minamata disease). Acute mercury poisoning causes severe digestive-tract inflammation. Mercury accumulates in the kidneys, causing uremia and death. Chronic poisoning, from occupational inhalation or skin absorption, causes metallic taste, oral inflammation, blue gum line, extremity pain and tremor, weight loss, and mental changes (depression and withdrawal). Drugs containing mercury can cause sensitivity reactions, sometimes fatal. In young children, acrodynia (pink disease) is probably caused by an organic mercury compound in house paints.
Mercury has long been known to be toxic; the phrase "mad as a hatter" refers to the 19th-century occupational disease that resulted from prolonged contact with the mercury used in the manufacture of felt hats.
Why were hat makers, known as hatters, described as mad? Animal fur was used by the hatters to make the hats of their day. Top hats were particularly popular. Beaver fur was the best and easiest fur to work with but it was becoming scarce and costly. Other furs such as rabbit had to be used to supply the demand for affordable hats. To turn the cheaper furs into useable material, an early step was to have the furs brushed with a solution of a mercury compound. The mercury brushed fur then had to be handled and worked with much more before it became a finished hat. Working in the poorly ventilated workshops, the hatters would breath in the mercury compounds.
Unknown at that time, mercury is a poison that will accumulate in the body. The effects of mercury on the body include kidney and brain damage. The symptoms include trembling, slurred and confused speech, irritability, memory loss, distorted vision, anxiety, and depression. Advanced cases would have hallucinations and other psychotic symptoms. The trembling was known at the time as the hatters shakes and the symptoms of mercury poisoning is sometimes known even today as mad hatters syndrome. The prolonged use of mercury nitrate had made the hatters mad. The original mad hatter was actually a victim of an early occupational disease.
In her classic work, Industrial Poisons in the United States, published in 1925, Alice Hamilton reviews the general subject of mercurialism in one chapter and devotes a separate chapter to the hat industry. The latter is longer than the former, reflecting the importance attached to health hazards among hatters during the first decades of the 20th century. According to Hamilton, the process of treating the fur with mercury nitrate, the so-called secretage, "...has been traced back to the middle of the 17th century when it was a secret in the hands of a few French workmen, evidently Huguenots; for at the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 when the Huguenots fled to England, they carried the secret with them, established the trade there, and for almost a century thereafter the French were dependent on England for their felt." This statement is difficult to reconcile with that which appears in Diderot's encyclopaedia published in 1753, to the effect that in preparing fur for making hats "...the pelts are rubbed with an acid solution before the fur is removed...." It is also at variance with an account of secretage given by Lee (1968) in which he states that the process was introduced into England from Frankfurt around 1870. The latter is in consonance with Thackrah's failure to include mercury poisoning in his description of hazards in the British hat industry in the early part of the 19th century.
We know that the kosminski family were involved in Tailoring and hat production. But I’d be interested if anyone has any more specific information on the types of hats and garmets that they might have been producing.
I’m not sayig that everyone involved in Hat making is a potencial Jack the Ripper or that would be the sole cause of Aarons illness.
What I’m interested in is the circumstance that might have affected a young man suffering this illness to have suddenly become violent.
Pirate Jack
Every now and then something an expert tells you sticks in your head.
Schizophrenics are NOT dangerous. They can however become very dangerous indeed in certain circumstances. However, one would normally expect there to be additional circumstance effecting that suffer. Alcohol or drugs. Today the common use of strong ‘grass’ or ‘weed’ means that mental health workers increasingly see young men and women suffering psychosis exacerbated by the drug.
Ok let’s cut to the chase. What I’m interested in is what drugs a young Jewish man might have been exposed to in the East end of 1888?
Aaron Kosminski was living in a tailoring sweat shop owned by his brother and I cant help wounding if exposure to chemicals stored in that environment might have had an effect on his mental condition.
In the sweatshop of 1850,the role of the sweater as middleman and subcontractor (or sub-subcontractor) was considered key, because he served to keep workers isolated in small workshops. This isolation made workers unsure of their supply of work, and unable to organize against their true employer through collective bargaining. Instead, tailors or other clothing retailers would subcontract tasks to the sweater, who in turn might subcontract to another sweater, who would ultimately engage workers at a piece rate for each article of clothing or seam produced. Kingsley asserted that the middleman made his profit by finding the most desperate workers, including immigrants from Ireland, women and children, who could be paid an absolute minimum. While workers who produced many pieces could earn more, less productive workers earned so little that critics termed their pay starvation wages. Employment was risky: injured or sick workers would be quickly replaced by others.
Between 1850 and 1900, sweatshops attracted the rural poor to rapidly-growing cities, and attracted immigrants to places like East London, England and New York City's garment district, located near the tenements of New York's Lower East Side. Wherever they were located, sweatshops also attracted critics and labour leaders who cited them as crowded, poorly ventilated, and prone to fires and rat infestations, since much of the work was done by many people crowded into small tenement rooms.
Avoiding a "progressive" view of history is a special challenge in the case of large technical changes that appear to define a watershed in human events -- as, for example, the "chemical revolution" of the 19th century, inaugurated by the discovery of the coal-tar dyes. The shift from natural materials to synthetic chemicals, and from craft techniques to machine processes, seems a sudden, dramatic, and complete transformation. Everything becomes a "before and after" story, as if there were no connections between the two stages, and it is easy to imagine that whatever came "after" worked better than what came "before." This interpretive tendency is exacerbated by the "magical" character of chemical reactions, particularly as they appear to people not already knowledgeable in chemistry.
Because the preindustrial, presynthetic phase of the wet processing of textiles depended upon natural ingredients, the men who practiced these arts had to know (even if not in a formal sense) as much biology as they did chemistry to understand the properties of their materials-- which came from plants, minerals, and animals. The manufacture of natural dyes required a good deal of skill, especially the more complicated dyes like indigo.
Mechanization and the factory system of production, which so altered the manufacture of cloth, also changed bleaching and dyeing--and increasingly these processes were incorporated into the factory itself. In fact, the widespread use of chemical products in cloth finishing directly followed the industrialization of textile production, reinforcing the shift from craft to factory methods.
The craft of bleaching involved repeated and complicated stages that included steeping yarn or cloth in water, scouring them in caustic solutions (usually made from wood ashes), "souring" them in buttermilk, and then exposing them to long periods of sunlight to whiten the material. In other words, it was a time-consuming and labor-intensive process. Scheele's discovery of chlorine in the late 18th century, its application to bleaching, and the subsequent industrial production of alkalis, made bleaching into a factory process and created a chemical industry whose chief customers were textile manufacturers. The use of chlorine-based bleaching powders, and later pressurized containers, substantially speeded up bleaching so that a job taking months in the 18th century could be accomplished in hours by the late-19th century. Even so, the successful use of chemical bleaching technologies still depended on a foreman's experience and skill.
Chemists had already been working along two directly relevant lines of activity. Some were investigating the properties of coal tar, a black, sticky, messy stuff left over in the production of lighting gas from coal, and from converting coal into coke. Coal tar had some medicinal qualities, but investigators noticed that it also carried colors.
Alice in Wonderland: "In that direction," the Cat said, waving its right paw around, "lives a Hatter; and in that direction," waving the other paw, "lives a March Hare. Visit either you like; they're both mad."
Harmful effects of mercury compounds. Manufacture of paints, various household items, and pesticides uses mercury; the finished product and the waste products released into air and water may contain mercury. The aquatic food chain can concentrate organic mercury compounds in fish and seafood, which, if eaten by humans, can affect the central nervous system, impairing muscle, vision, and cerebral function, leading to paralysis and sometimes death (see Minamata disease). Acute mercury poisoning causes severe digestive-tract inflammation. Mercury accumulates in the kidneys, causing uremia and death. Chronic poisoning, from occupational inhalation or skin absorption, causes metallic taste, oral inflammation, blue gum line, extremity pain and tremor, weight loss, and mental changes (depression and withdrawal). Drugs containing mercury can cause sensitivity reactions, sometimes fatal. In young children, acrodynia (pink disease) is probably caused by an organic mercury compound in house paints.
Mercury has long been known to be toxic; the phrase "mad as a hatter" refers to the 19th-century occupational disease that resulted from prolonged contact with the mercury used in the manufacture of felt hats.
Why were hat makers, known as hatters, described as mad? Animal fur was used by the hatters to make the hats of their day. Top hats were particularly popular. Beaver fur was the best and easiest fur to work with but it was becoming scarce and costly. Other furs such as rabbit had to be used to supply the demand for affordable hats. To turn the cheaper furs into useable material, an early step was to have the furs brushed with a solution of a mercury compound. The mercury brushed fur then had to be handled and worked with much more before it became a finished hat. Working in the poorly ventilated workshops, the hatters would breath in the mercury compounds.
Unknown at that time, mercury is a poison that will accumulate in the body. The effects of mercury on the body include kidney and brain damage. The symptoms include trembling, slurred and confused speech, irritability, memory loss, distorted vision, anxiety, and depression. Advanced cases would have hallucinations and other psychotic symptoms. The trembling was known at the time as the hatters shakes and the symptoms of mercury poisoning is sometimes known even today as mad hatters syndrome. The prolonged use of mercury nitrate had made the hatters mad. The original mad hatter was actually a victim of an early occupational disease.
In her classic work, Industrial Poisons in the United States, published in 1925, Alice Hamilton reviews the general subject of mercurialism in one chapter and devotes a separate chapter to the hat industry. The latter is longer than the former, reflecting the importance attached to health hazards among hatters during the first decades of the 20th century. According to Hamilton, the process of treating the fur with mercury nitrate, the so-called secretage, "...has been traced back to the middle of the 17th century when it was a secret in the hands of a few French workmen, evidently Huguenots; for at the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 when the Huguenots fled to England, they carried the secret with them, established the trade there, and for almost a century thereafter the French were dependent on England for their felt." This statement is difficult to reconcile with that which appears in Diderot's encyclopaedia published in 1753, to the effect that in preparing fur for making hats "...the pelts are rubbed with an acid solution before the fur is removed...." It is also at variance with an account of secretage given by Lee (1968) in which he states that the process was introduced into England from Frankfurt around 1870. The latter is in consonance with Thackrah's failure to include mercury poisoning in his description of hazards in the British hat industry in the early part of the 19th century.
We know that the kosminski family were involved in Tailoring and hat production. But I’d be interested if anyone has any more specific information on the types of hats and garmets that they might have been producing.
I’m not sayig that everyone involved in Hat making is a potencial Jack the Ripper or that would be the sole cause of Aarons illness.
What I’m interested in is the circumstance that might have affected a young man suffering this illness to have suddenly become violent.
Pirate Jack
Daoh! you beat me to it...
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