The wrong cask
About twenty people died in Bradford, England, in 1858 because a white powder was taken from the wrong cask. That is about three hours of this counter.
This counter is 60,000 deaths a year, and the line under it is accidental swallowing or inhalation. The 60,000 is a round of two unintentional totals for 2021: about 27,000 deaths from poisoning other than carbon monoxide, and about 29,000 from carbon monoxide itself. Together that is about 56,000. Suicide is not in either total. In several countries the poisoning deaths people have heard of are people poisoning themselves, often with pesticide. Those deaths are self-harm. They are outside this card for the same reason the atlas stopped calling suicide an accident. If you need a person to talk to, findahelpline.com lists free, confidential lines in most countries.
Humbug Billy
At the end of October 1858, Joseph Neal, a confectioner in Bradford, England, sent for a cheap powder called daft, a gypsum used to stretch sugar. The druggist, Charles Hodgson, was ill and told his assistant, William Goddard, where the cask was. There were two unmarked casks of white powder. Goddard took arsenic. The arsenic was mixed into peppermint lozenges. William Hardaker, known in the market as Humbug Billy, sold them from his stall. He ate some himself.
The first deaths were children, reported on the morning of Sunday 31 October. For a few hours it looked like cholera, which is what a sudden vomiting illness looked like in that town. The sweets were the common fact. Analysts found arsenic in the lozenges in amounts that would kill. About twenty people died. More than two hundred were made ill. Hardaker survived and was left paralysed. Hodgson, Goddard and Neal were sent for trial for manslaughter and acquitted. The arsenic had been sold and mixed in the belief that it was daft.
What the round is
The deaths helped produce the Adulteration of Food or Drink Act 1860 and, a decade on, the Pharmacy Act 1868, which put the sale of listed poisons into the hands of qualified druggists and required labels. They were a cause of those laws, not the only cause. About twenty deaths are about three hours of a 60,000-a-year counter.
The counter now is what labelling did not finish. Carbon monoxide from heaters, stoves and generators, which is about half the round. Household products and medicines swallowed by children. Methanol in a drink that was supposed to be alcohol. Pesticide in a bottle that was supposed to be something else, when the person did not mean to take it. A market stall in 1858 is a clean story because the inquest agreed it was an accident. A current in a wire is a different accident, told in Noon at Chambers Street.
This is not safety advice. It is a story about a population statistic. It says nothing about any one person's risk from a substance in the house.
Sources
- The BBC's account of the poisonings in Bradford, England, and the Pharmacy Act 1868.
- A 2021 Global Burden of Disease analysis of unintentional poisoning other than carbon monoxide, about 27,000 deaths.
- The Lancet Public Health, 2023, on unintentional carbon monoxide poisoning: 28,900 deaths in 2021.
- The annual figure used on the counter is the Ledger's own rounding, set out on the methodology page.