Legacy Matters

Killed by Wallpaper

At Slate, Daniel Kevles gives us a history of poison.  Favored more by women, trusted with food preparation and administration of medicine, as an undetectable way to get rid of  husbands, cover up theft, and gain inheritances, arsenic became know as poudre de succession, "inheritance powder."

Poisoning was also relatively easy to get away with for centuries because possession of the murder weapon was by no means a clear indicator of guilt. Would-be poisoners could easily obtain the requisite materials from the shops of apothecaries or chemists, under the guise of using them in small doses for a cosmetic or medical purpose.
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Emsley, an accomplished science writer based at Cambridge University, dons his own detective's hat. He deploys recent scientific analyses of hair and exhumed bone, matches them against historical reports of victims' symptoms, and offers plausible explanations of the victims' bizarre behavior and mysterious or disputed deaths.

Mozart probably died of antimony poisoning, King Charles II of Britain, likely died from inhalation of intense mercury vapors while The Madness of King George was a textbook case of acute lead poisoning.

Most interesting is the case of Napoleon Bonaparte who was exhumed from his grave on St Helena to be reburied in Paris at Les Invalides twenty years after his death.  His body was chemically tested and found to contain high levels of arsenic.

Who poisoned him?  Was if the British?  A jealous husband? Emsley argues that Napoleon was killed by his wallpaper.

or more precisely, drawing on the work of an Italian scientist named Bartolomeo Gosio, by the green, arsenic-rich pigment in the wallpaper's star pattern.
At the end of the 19th century, Gosio was prompted to investigate why so many Italian children were inexplicably sickening and dying. Physicians suspected arsenic poisoning. Gosio demonstrated that a microorganism that grew on the flour-paste backing of the wallpaper could turn the arsenic in it into a gas that was powerful enough to make people ill and even kill them. If Napoleon chose the colors of his wallpaper to commemorate his imperial colors, Emsley writes, "[H]e did himself no favours … though they reminded him of his glorious past."

UPDATE:  A new report from Vienna claims that Beethoven was done in by his physician who overdosed him with lead in a case of a cure gone wrong.

UPDATE 2:  How could I have forgotten Oscar Wilde's last words, "Either that wallpaper goes, or I do."