Blog Archive for Sarah Albee, Writer of History and Science Books for Kids

Death By Apple

Posted October 9, 2014

I stumbled across a strange, sad little anecdote the other day as I was researching something on another topic. It was a picture of a little girl in a fashionable dress, and the author casually mentioned that the child died a few days after the picture was taken. The cause of her death was a stomach ache after eating green apples.

That struck me as so odd that I did a quick search. I was astonished—a search of death from green apples in the historic newspapers database from 1790 to the present database yielded 800 stories.

Here are just a few:

From 1817:

and 1901 Screen Shot 2014-01-22 at 6.34.43 AM and 1911: Screen Shot 2014-01-22 at 6.32.08 AM

and 1921

Screen Shot 2014-01-22 at 6.36.16 AM They go on and on, but by the late 1920s you stop seeing death notices due to green apples. Doctors quoted about the causes of death from green apple ingestion range from acute indigestion to convulsions to cholera. Articles from the 1930s to the 1970s include lots of advice columns that warn people to avoid green apples. By the 1980s, all the articles are recipes that include green apples.

The latest reference I could find suggesting they’re toxic is from a veterinarian in the Cleveland Plain Dealer (12/20/1961), who says green apples are bad for horses–and for children–because they ferment in the large intestine, causing the abdomen to swell and leading to severe pain and convulsions.

I wonder if the apples really did kill the kids, or if it might have been something else. It could have been cholera I suppose, which is a waterborne illness but can be transferred by flies to improperly washed vegetables. Or they might have ingested too many apple seeds, which contain cyanide and really can kill you in large doses.

I am working on researching the cause. If you have theories/leads, please let me know!

Garden of Deadly Delights

Posted October 6, 2014

Yesterday I drove to Ithaca, New York, where I met up with Mary Smith, Professor of Veterinary Medicine at Cornell University. Cornell’s College of Veterinary Medicine maintains a poisonous plants garden, which makes sense, if you think about it. Veterinary students need to learn to recognize plants that poison livestock. Professor Smith took a couple of hours out of her Sunday afternoon to give me a personal tour of the Poisonous Plants garden, and then as an added bonus, walked me around the Weeds garden and then the “Crops of the World” garden. She is hugely knowledgeable about plants and poisons.

I’ve been researching poisons for some months now, and it was downright thrilling to encounter the actual toxic plants after having read about them. Kind of like bumping into a famous actor on the street after you’ve just seen him playing an evil villain in a movie. Here are some of the stars of the poison plant world I met:

This is poison hemlock, of the species that killed Socrates. The sign says Foxglove, but that’s for a different plant:And here’s tobacco. The pink flowers were so pretty. I was surprised by how beautiful some of these plants were.Another beautiful but oh-so-deadly one: Monkshood.Here’s snakeroot, which poisoned (and killed) Abraham Lincoln’s mother (she died of “milk sick,” an all-too-common illness of many pioneer-era people). Professor Smith explained to me that the toxin is fat soluble, so the cow can eat snakeroot and not be harmed because she excretes it in her milk. But calves and people who drink the milk can be fatally poisoned.And THIS is Belladonna, aka Deadly Nighshade. I squealed when I saw it, as I hadn’t expected to see any, particularly in Ithaca, New York in early October—it’s a Mediterranean plant. It contains the alkaloid atropine, which is what makes your pupils dilate at the eye doctor’s. I don’t know if you can see those shiny black berries, but they do make for an impressively-ominous-looking plant:Here’s Datura stramonium, aka Jimsonweed, aka Jamestown Weed. Lots of cool history with this plant, starting with how the Jamestown settlers purportedly slipped some of this powerful hallucinogen into the food of British officers and then watched them put proverbial lampshades on their heads for several days. Can you see the fuzzy brown pod that’s split open and showing the black interior? That’s the most toxic part.And this beautiful plant? Ricinus communus, aka the Castor bean plant. This is the plant that produces the poison ricin in its seeds. Ricin is five hundred times more toxic than arsenic or cyanide. (Fans of Breaking Bad will know this one.)Here’s Professor Smith, photographing some castor bean seeds for her students to ID on an upcoming quiz:After she took the photo, she hopped up and handed me the two seeds to take home as a souvenir. It was . . . unsettling to find myself holding a potent poison in my bare hand in the middle of a field. I guess she realized I was a bit disquieted, because she pulled out a tissue and wrapped them up for me.

“Should I be worried about, er, you know, holding these in my bare hand?” I asked her.

“Nah,” she said, “although you’ll definitely want to wash your hands after this.”

Follow up: after I got home last night and had washed my hands until most of the soap was used up, I looked up ricin in my notes. It turns out, two castor beans are enough to kill a person if one were to chew them (or pulverize them and slip them into someone’s tea). But because the hard seed coat prevents the body from absorbing the poison, the beans can pass harmlessly through a person’s system if swallowed whole, or held in one’s hand in the middle of a field.

Let Them Eat Jiggly Soup

Posted October 2, 2014

Back in the early nineteenth century, with populations in cities swelling, feeding the poor cheaply in poorhouses and public hospitals became a growing concern.

In her fascinating book, Gulp, Mary Roach describes the efforts of a French chemist named Jean d’Arcet, Jr., who in 1817 came up with a method for extracting gelatin from bones. I’m not sure why this was such a complicated undertaking—anyone who has ever boiled up a turkey carcass after the Thanksgiving meal would see that the resulting broth, if allowed to cool, gets all jiggly and gelatinous. But d’Arcet seems to have figured out how to reduce his “extract of bones” down to pure, concentrated gelatin.

He peddled his glop to public hospitals and poor houses, claiming that two ounces of his gelatin was equal in nutrition to three pounds of meat.

So gelatin soup became standard fare in places that fed the poor for the next twenty years, despite “criticisms and complaints.”[1] It wasn’t until 1831 that a group of physicians decided to test the gelatin soup against traditional bouillon. They found it “more distasteful, more putrescible, less digestible, less nutritious”[2] in comparison.

But not much was done, aside from forming a “Gelatin Commission.” As Roach so brilliantly puts it, “The French Academy of Sciences sprang into inaction.”[3]

It took ten more years for the Gelatin Commission to declare the gelatin soup ineffective. This after feeding it to dogs and finding the soup excited “an intolerable distaste to a degree which renders starvation preferable.”[4]

Sources:

Mary Roach, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal, New York: WW Norton, 2013

Dawson, Percy M. A Biography of François Magendie. Brooklyn: Albert T. Huntington, 1908

[1] Dawson, 33

[2] Dawson, 33

[3] Roach, 85

[4] Dawson, 34-5

Fetching Names

Posted September 29, 2014

In case you’ve recently acquired a new dog, and are wondering what to name it, look no further than the early fifteenth-century manuscript called The Master of Game. Appended at the end is a list of suitable names for your hunting dog. Here are some suggestions:

Nosewise

Swepestake

Smylfeste

Trynket

Amiable

Nameles

Holdfast

Absolom

Another medieval manuscript suggests Huiiau, which doesn’t quite roll off the tongue, and Blessiau, which would invite the inevitable snide rejoinder “But I didn’t sneeze.” Still, your dog would likely be the only one at the dog park with such a historically significant name.

Then again, there’s always Max or Cooper.

Source: Kathleen Walker-Meikle, Medieval Dogs

Images: Miniature of Canis Minor, in tables from Ptolemy's Almagest, from the British Library

Harley 2278 f. 44v Lothbrok's dog from the British Library

Detail of a miniature of a Lothbrok's dog leading a knight to Lothbrok's body. Harley 2278   f. 45v the British Library

Beauty Tips

Posted September 22, 2014

Library of Congress LC-USZ62-102221

I got sidetracked in my research again. But you, Dear Reader, will be the beneficiary, because I stumbled upon a book from 1910, written by one Margaret Mixter, entitled Health and Beauty Hints, that is filled with sensible advice. Take fitness. Turns out we’ve been going about it all wrong. What, according to Ms. Mixter, is the best exercise to develop “a round, pretty figure?” Why, housework.

Yes, that’s right. Put away your running shoes. Roll up your yoga mat. Ms. Mixter maintains that “sweeping, dusting, or even washing, if the latter is not too heavy to strain the muscles, helps to strengthen and beautify the body. (207)

“Sweeping,” she continues, “is one of the best methods of rounding the arms, as well as giving correct poise. A woman whose shoulders are well thrown back, when she grasps the broom firmly, and sways her whole body, with each stroke, may add grace to her figure.”

Cornell University Library – http://publicdomainreview.org/collections/correct-postures-for-housework-1920s/#sthash.EjSa8p1x.dpuf

Don’t laugh. Housework was no joke back in 1910. Stoves had to be blackened, hearths had to be swept, and carpets had to be beaten on a regular basis. The first motorized vacuum cleaner was patented and sold to William Henry Hoover in 1908, so at the time of the writing of Health and Beauty Hints, it’s unlikely that many housewives owned their own model yet. Most housewives (or their servants) must have had very round arms.

A hand-powered pneumatic vacuum cleaner, circa 1910. via Wikimedia

“Few women seem to know that a constant firm grasp of an object such as a broom or hard duster handle will round the arms,” Ms. Minter shares.

She is also brimming with suggestions for ways to whittle your waist. Here’s one: “Bending over a wash tub affects the waist line and hips to their betterment when the lean comes from the waist, and not from the shoulders.” (208)

Toronto!

Posted September 18, 2014

This past weekend I traveled to Toronto. I went there for two reasons: to see the exhibit called “Fashion Victims: The Pleasures and Perils of Dress in the 19th Century” at the Bata Shoe Museum, and to meet my friend Y.S. Lee.I first heard about Ying’s books on Twitter several years ago, and after reading them, loved them so much I fan-girl friended her on Facebook. We’ve been e-friends ever since, but had never met in person. We toured the exhibit together, and then had lunch, and then Ying, who is from Canada and knows Toronto well, showed me around the city. It was a fantastic day–we talked nonstop, all the way to the last seconds as she was running to catch her train. We did manage to stop talking long enough to take this selfie:It was really fun to tour the exhibit together, because we’re both huge fans of nineteenth century fashions. (Ying has a PhD in Victorian literature, and all her books are set in 19^th century London. Here’s my review of her third one. Her fourth installment is due out in February, published by Candlewick. Here’s the cover:I loved this pair of shoes dyed with arsenic-based green. They match exactly some arsenical green gloves I bought on ebay. You can’t see the beautiful shade of green in this photo, but trust me:And they had some William Morris arsenical-green wallpaper. It’s not a great picture, because I wasn’t allowed to use flash:It was cool to see these purple shoes, which were dyed with William Perkin’s brand-new invention, the first chemically-made (C₂₆H₂₃N₄⁺X⁻), aniline dye. He called it mauveine. I thought it would be much pinker, but it’s a lovely purple. Note that the shoes are “straights,” and not made for right or left feet. And they’re all so narrow. Corns and bunions were a terrible problem. These pink baby shoes are for a boy. Ying informed me that the traditional gender-assigned colors were reversed in the nineteenth century: pink was for boys and blue was for girls.The exhibition runs through June of next year. Toronto is a lovely city with lots of funky neighborhoods and terrific restaurants. Well worth a visit!

Baby Carriers

Posted September 15, 2014

In the first part of the nineteenth century, it was fashionable to dress babies in long petticoats to protect them from drafts. Voluminous clothing might also help keep a child from slipping out of its mother’s or nursemaid’s arms. According to Elizabeth Ewing in her History of Children’s Costume, the first modern baby carriage in America was introduced in 1848 by Charles Burton, but it was soon banned for being a nuisance to pedestrians. He had more success opening a factory in Britain, but it wasn’t until the 1870s that a pram was created where a baby could lie down. So prior to 1870, babies had to be carried.A well-nourished 18-month-old weighed an average of 26 pounds. (Quick aside: Have a look at these next two pictures: the first one really gives you a sense of the baby’s heft. The mother in the second one doesn’t seem to be straining to hold that kid at all.) By the 1870s, you start to see baby prams in paintings. The impressionists seemed fond of painting them. Here’s Degas:and Gauguin:and here’s a later model, 1913. It’s such a sweet picture, isn’t it?

LOC 708611913

Tough to Swallow

Posted September 11, 2014

A few days ago my writer friend, Erin Dionne, posted this status update:

Erin is a fantastic writer, incidentally. You should read her new book, if you haven’t yet.

She followed up with

(Loree Burns is another writer friend, who has written several nonfiction books about insects. If you don’t yet have them, you should run out and buy all of her books immediately.)

Erin’s post sparked a lively conversation in the comments, where many of Erin’s friends began to speculate about just how long a live insect, swallowed whole, might survive inside her stomach. The fiction writers were nice—“the stomach acid would kill it right away.” Those of us who write nonfiction weren’t so sure. How long could a fly survive in an anaerobic environment full of hydrochloric acid? I surmised it would stay alive “thirty minutes, tops.” Loree, who joined the conversation a bit later, recommended that Erin read Hugh Raffles’ Insectopedia for an overview of aeroplankton. “He describes the stuff we breathe as ‘a vault of insect-laden air from which falls a continuous rain.’ Of bugs. We’re all breathing them in more than we think.” Kind of like krill for land animals. For some reason, Erin didn’t seem to take comfort in our comments.

And luckily for Erin, I happened to be reading Mary Roach’s Gulp, and had just reached a section (chapter 9, pp 167 – 177) where she discusses this very topic: could a nonparasitic creature swallowed whole survive inside a stomach for any length of time? For instance, if your pet reptile swallowed a live mealworm, could that mealworm chew its way out of your pet reptile’s stomach (as has been rumored on various internet listserves)?

In fact, mealworms actually can live awhile inside the reptile’s stomach, although they go dormant once they’ve been swallowed. Still, they don’t get digested quickly. Turns out, hydrochloric (gastric) acid isn’t nearly as caustic as you might think. Roach quotes a herpetologist who reported watching a crab-eating snake (Fordonia leucobalia) vomit up crabs three hours after eating them, and the crabs stood up and ran away. Another scientist tells the story of his dog, Gracie, a part-Doberman, who vomited up a two foot garter snake in the middle of the floor during a dinner party. Gracie had been inside the house for at least two hours. When his wife picked up the snake with a wad of paper towels, it flicked its little tongue out at her. (160) (I cited this latter story to Erin in a follow up comment. Judging by the responses, some of the fiction writers didn’t seem to have the proper takeaway.)

Update: I just emailed Erin to ask if she minded being featured in a blog post about swallowing live living things, and she said no, but that in fact, she hadn’t actually swallowed her bug. “It flew into my mouth, *stuck to my uvula* and I horked it back out,” she reported. Well, now we’ll know in case the worst happens next time.

By Siga [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Poisonous Powders

Posted September 8, 2014

Livre d’heures de Jean de Montauban – Bibliothèque des Champs Libres

One of my favorite memories from childhood was opening a new box of crayons. I marveled at the beautiful hues. When I was older and took painting classes, I never lost that feeling of awe at the brilliant, saturated colors that came right out of the paint tube. But five hundred years ago, painters didn’t have the luxury of buying their paints from the art supply store. They had to mix their own colors. This was often difficult, expensive, or dangerous. Sometimes it was difficult, expensive and dangerous. What’s amazing is how they still managed to produce such intense, gorgeous colors.

First, to get the terms straight: the pigment is the coloring agent in paints. It usually came in powdered form and, pre 19^th century, was almost always found in nature (animal-based, plant-based, or from naturally occurring minerals). Painters mixed the powdery pigment with a binding agent so that it could be applied as paint. Binding agents could be any number of things, but they included egg tempera, pine resin, gum arabic, honey, and even earwax.

Here are how some common colors from medieval and Renaissance times were produced. If you didn’t already appreciate beautiful paintings from these periods, you’ll surely do so now, just for the sheer energy it took to produce the colors. (It wasn’t always the artist himself who made the pigments, of course. It might have been his assistant, or someone else at the monastery.)

Reds

Many of the so-called “red lakes” were made from ground up insects. To produce them, painters boiled up the powdered, dried lac, kermes, or cochineal insects with urine or lye, and then mixed it with a binding agent.

Vermillion, another red color, was made from cinnabar, which is the principal ore of mercury. Or you could just heat together sulphur and mercury to form an artificial cinnabar. (Heating up mercury? Never a good plan.) Traces of cinnabar have been found in the bones of medieval scribes, and probably hastened them toward an early death.

Masters of the Dark Eyes Missal, Initial S with Presentation in the Temple, Walters Manuscript W.175, fol. 158v

Blues

Azurite was a deep blue pigment that contained arsenic sulphide, and creating it produced a toxic gas called mercury cyanide. It was expensive, but slightly cheaper than ultramarine, the most expensive pigment. Ultramarine was made by grinding up the precious stone lapis lazuli, and because it was so expensive it was reserved mostly for paintings of Christ and the Virgin.

The Wilton Diptych By Unknown Master, French (second half of 14th century) (Web Gallery of Art: via Wikimedia Commons

Gold was often used to gild manuscripts. The painter started with a base adherent and then carefully positioned the gold leaf on the page. After it dried, the excess was removed.

Aussem Hours, SS. Catherine and Barbara, with gold and floral marginal decoration, Walters Manuscript W.437, fol. 108v

Lamp black was made from soot or charcoal.

White lead pigment was made by suspending strips of lead over vinegar or urine inside a vase. The vase was sealed, and buried in a dung heap for a few days. A crust formed on the lead. It was scraped away and ground up.

Albrecht Durer, detail, Four Holy Men

Green pigments included verdegreen, malachite, and Spanish green. Many of these were derived from arsenical compounds and were highly toxic.

Albrecht Durer, Portrait of Maximilian I, 1519

Yellows

Orpiment, also called King’s Yellow, was made from a volcanic stone with a sparkly quality that was found all over the world. It was extremely poisonous, as it, too, contained arsenic.

Sources:

https://www.ischool.utexas.edu/~cochinea/pdfs/a-baker-04-pigments.pdf

http://www.webexhibits.org/pigments/intro/history.html

http://www.jcsparks.com/painted/pigment-chem.html

http://web.princeton.edu/sites/ehs/artsafety/sec10.htm

Greetings to All

Posted September 4, 2014

816aba34ccb2e5800c66a6acb6f28545 As I may or may not have mentioned in my last blog post, one of the best–but also most perilous–things about doing research is that it’s so easy to get sidetracked. While looking for images for my book proposal, I spent a lot of time that I don’t really have to spare looking at Victorian/early twentieth century greeting cards on various archives (British Museum, Library of Congress, and New York Public Library). They’re fascinating.

The penny post was introduced in Britain in 1840, and that meant a lot of people could afford to send mail. According to the British Museum website, in 1843 an art shop owner printed a thousand greeting cards and sold them in his shop in London for a shilling apiece. The railroads encouraged sending greeting cards—Christmas and Valentines were especially popular–and posting them got even cheaper in 1870.

Have a look at some of these. I didn’t see many cute puppies and kittens like the ones you see on greeting cards nowadays, I guess the creepy dogs in the two cards, below, might have been meant to be cute:

But naked cherubs tended to be popular. Screen Shot 2014-06-23 at 8.52.22 AM

And weird social commentaries with anthropomorphized animals. Xmas3 Xmas2 19072r

And cars bedecked with flowers but no drivers seemed like popular settings in the era when the first cars rolled out: birthdaycardx36-328x328 I’m not sure what this one is supposed to be about–the caption says “Happy may your Christmas be,” but to me it looks more like the boy with the whip is menacing the cowering boy in blue. And he’s definitely smooshing the kid’s hat:

If you click on the picture it will take you to the British Library url and you can see it enlarged.

Now I really have to get back to my research.