The Right Chemistry: Arsenic has taken a deadly toll, by accident and by design
Unintentionally poisoning people or zoo animals is one thing, doing it intentionally is quite another.
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It was July of 1905 and the mammal house in the Bronx Zoo was buzzing with flies. The reason? A heatwave had struck New York and flies multiply more quickly in hot weather. While fly eggs normally hatch into maggots in about 20 hours, in hot weather this can be cut in half. The lifespan of a fly is only around three weeks, but in that period a female can lay about 900 eggs. No wonder that flies were swarming all over the animals and visitors in the hot, humid building that housed a variety of mammals. Something had to be done!
Dr. Blair, the zoo’s veterinarian, decided on flypaper, two types of which were available: hangable paper strips covered with glue to trap any unlucky flies that landed on it, and paper infused with sugar and sodium arsenite designed to be immersed in a container of water. Flies would be attracted by the sugar and sent off to fly heaven by the arsenic. Blair thought the latter would fit the bill. There was a problem, though. Plunging into the arsenic-laced water was not always fatal and some flies soaked in the poisonous solution made it into the animal cages. As a result, the caretaker who opened the mammal house the next morning was confronted by a terrible scene. Two foxes, a wallaby, an armadillo, a guinea pig, and an opossum lay dead. A Malay sun bear and an anteater were convulsing. Autopsies confirmed the animals had been poisoned with arsenic, probably by eating dead flies.
Accidental poisoning of animals with arsenic is one thing. Accidentally killing 21 people and sickening more than 200 is quite another. That, however, is just what “Humbug Billy” did in Bradford, England, in 1858. William Hardaker didn’t earn his nickname from peddling nonsense. Billy was peddling “humbugs,” a traditional British peppermint-flavoured candy with distinctive coloured stripes. He didn’t make the candies himself. Usually, he purchased them from Joseph Neal, a local producer of sweets. The basic ingredient of humbugs, as in all candies, is sugar. Today that is a cheap commodity, but in Victorian England, sugar had to be imported by ship from the West Indies at great expense. It was therefore not uncommon for unscrupulous merchants, like Neal, to extend the sugar with some cheap substitute such as gypsum.
Neal sent a messenger to a pharmacy to purchase some gypsum. Unfortunately, the pharmacist’s assistant made a terrible mistake, reached into the wrong container, and doled out arsenic trioxide instead. Pharmacies commonly stocked arsenic as rat poison and also sold gypsum (calcium sulphate) which was used to make plaster casts for broken bones. Both are white powders, so the mistake was not immediately evident. Hardaker did notice that the texture of the candies wasn’t quite right and got Neal to agree to a discount. Twenty-one people died and some 200 were sickened within a day of purchasing the inadvertently adulterated humbugs. Neal, the pharmacist, and his assistant were charged with manslaughter but were eventually acquitted. The courts ruled that no malice had been intended.
This whole sordid affair did have a positive offshoot. It was a contributing factor in the passage of the Pharmacy Act of 1868, which tightened the way potentially poisonous substances were be sold. Strychnine, cyanide, ergot, opium and arsenic could only be sold if the seller knew the purchaser’s intended purpose and they had to be sold in containers with the pharmacist’s name and address.
Unintentionally poisoning people with arsenic is one thing, doing it intentionally is quite another. The Borgias, perhaps history’s most famous crime family, were fond of eliminating 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 wished to dispense with their abusive husbands. Less well-known are the antics of Zsuzsanna Fazekas, a Hungarian midwife, who followed in the footsteps of Madam Toffana.
As the First World War approached, the men of Nagyrev were sent off to the front. They left behind wives many of whom had been locked into unhappy arranged marriages without the possibility of divorce in a Catholic country. Then chance intervened. During the war, remote Nagyrev became a holding place for POWs who were pretty much at liberty to roam the town and please the local women. Having tasted a better life, these women were not keen to welcome home their often-abusive husbands. Madame Fazekas offered an option. She was quite willing to teach the women how to extract arsenic from flypaper and use it to do away with undesirable family members.
Soon there was a virtual epidemic of deaths in the town, and by 1929 authorities had become suspicious enough to exhume dozens of corpses. Tests confirmed the presence of arsenic. The “Angel Makers,” as the women would be dubbed, were responsible for some 40 deaths.
Twenty-six of the Angel Makers were arrested, with eight being sentenced to death. Fazekas, who is suspected of having poisoned her own husband before coming to Nagyrev, was not one of them. When she saw the writing on the wall, she boiled up a dose of flypaper and sat down to her last meal just as the gendarmes approached her house.
There has been talk of turning that house into a museum devoted to arsenic. The thinking is that tourists would be attracted just like flies are attracted to flypaper.
Joe Schwarcz is director of McGill University’s Office for Science & Society (mcgill.ca/oss). He hosts The Dr. Joe Show on CJAD Radio 800 AM every Sunday from 3 to 4 p.m.
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