Five Unusual Ways People Used Lead—and Suffered For It

Lead-icine

Upper-class men and women in ancient Egypt commonly defined their eyes with kohl—a dark powder made from lead sulfide. Strangely, the makeup seemed to offer protection from common eye infections; recognizing this, Egyptians may have synthesized the lead cosmetic specifically to enhance its medicinal properties. In 2009, modern chemists actually tested the toxic remedy’s effectiveness by mixing lead salts with human skin cells. Sure enough, the lead-affected cells produced more immune-response chemicals, preventing infection.

All Roads Lead to Rome

Though Romans famously channeled water through lead pipes, that water might not have been their main problem: Mountain streams were rich in calcium, which coated the pipes in a layer that may have prevented lead from entering the water. In fact, historians think Romans likely got their daily dose of lead through a different beverage. Boiling syrups like sapa in lead cauldrons contaminated their sweetened wines; drinkers could experience psychosis, anemia and fertility problems.

Age of Bronze, Age of Lead 

China’s Bronze Age was oddly rich in lead. Up to 4,000 years ago in the Yellow River Valley, craftspeople were smelting tin, copper and lead into bronze goblets, and Shang dynasty nobles drank rice wine from these ornate cups. Modern scientists tested the potential effects of drinking such an acidic spirit from a toxic metal and found that one drinker’s daily lead intake would have been as high as 85 micrograms—enough to cause chronic lead poisoning, a.k.a. plumbism.

Coining a Malady

Ancient Greeks made their coins by extracting silver from lead-rich ore. Greece’s mining and smelting operations ended up seriously polluting Earth’s atmosphere, as modern scientists have confirmed via buried deposits in Greenlandic glaciers of lead dust that blew over from Greece long ago. In the second century B.C., the physician Nicander of Colophon was the first to record nausea, fatigue and delusions as symptoms of severe plumbism.

Lick of Paint 

Between the 15th and 20th centuries, lead pigments were used in white paint, and they became so common in oil paints that artists’ plumbism symptoms were commonly referred to as “painter’s colic.” The Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh suffered psychological maladies throughout his life, but his infamous ear-cutting delirium might have been exacerbated by plumbism: He had a well-known habit of licking the tip of his paintbrush.  

Sonja Anderson | READ MORE

Sonja Anderson is a writer and reporter based in Chicago.