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  • In pictures

Mass murder and marvellous medicine

Find out how arsenic has been used for good and ill, to cure and kill, for centuries.

  • Book extract

Renaissance women and their killer cosmetics

In this extract from ‘How to be a Renaissance Woman’, Jill Burke delves into a complex world of beauty products, poison and patriarchy – and reveals the impossible contradictions of femininity faced by 16th-century women.

  • Article

Colonialism and the origins of skin bleaching

The widespread practice of skin bleaching was heavily influenced by the Western colonisation and slavery of African and South Asian countries. Ngunan Adamu explores this toxic history.

  • Article

Tracing the toxic story of tear gas

Investigating tear gas – from factory to Black Lives Matter protest – Imani Jacqueline Brown uncovers a toxic legacy where pollution, violence and racism are intimately entwined.

All stories (12)

Images

  • Furnace used in processing arsenic. Etching.
  • Manufacture of arsenic. Valentini, Museum museorum.
  • Diagram of products of arsenic used in chemotherapy.
  • A patient suffering adverse effects of arsenic treatment. Coloured lithograph, ca. 1850.
  • A patient suffering adverse effects of arsenic treatment. Coloured lithograph, ca. 1850.
  • An unscrupulous chemist selling a child arsenic and laudanum. Wood engraving after J. Leech.
  • Furnace used in the processing of arsenic. Etching by Bénard after L.J. Goussier.
  • A chemist gives a demonstration involving arsenic to an audience. Coloured lithograph by H. Daumier, 1841.
  • This month (April) you should abstain from hemlock, henbane, deadly mandrake, arsenic sublimate, etc., for most physicians agree that all these plants are more or less unwholesome ...
  • Death as a lethal confectioner making up sweets using arsenic and plaster of Paris as ingredients; representing the toxic adulteration of sweets in the 1858 Bradford sweets poisoning. Wood engraving after J. Leech, 1858.
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