Why Were Victorian Homes So Dangerous? | Hidden Killers | Absolute History

it was the Victorians who cherished the idea of home as a domestic Haven they coined the phrase safe as houses and in this age of invention homes were bursting at the seams with new gadgets products and conveniences in the bedroom were the latest beauty products and manufactured clothes while in the nursery the toys were brand new and factory produced and for the first time the stove warmed the entire house the original home sweet home but there was a problem many of the exciting products and appealing innovations they welcomed into their homes were not just health hazards they were killers and with the aid of science our seek out these domestic assassins their houses were disgusting I'll be revealing what the Victorians couldn't see inside their homes these things undoubtedly would have killed many children and showing the terrible injuries that were inflicted in the name of progress what you need to do is move your bust up okay and I'll feel the strain of chasing the Victorian ideal welcome to the perilous world of the real Victorian home in the second half of the 19th century cities exploded to house the booming middle classes in just over 50 years their number grew from two and a half million to over nine and these new urban middle classes took immense pride in their homes they had money and they wanted to spend it on making their houses cozy havens of Donna's to steam and comfort not for these people the grim perils of victorian factory life or the gritty reality of the overcrowded streets the sort of family who lived here enjoyed a level of comfort and luxury previously unknown to ordinary people the cost of necessities fell dramatically and new mass production techniques made Goods available and affordable this meant a level of conspicuous consumption never witnessed before they filled their rooms with things that made the house a home [Music] they've been inspired by the Great Exhibition of 1851 which showcased the latest and the best in gadgets and consumer goods what had been happening now for the best part of a hundred years suddenly crystallized in this extraordinary exhibition it wasn't so much that he was new as it was just suddenly boom in bulk as the century went on and consumerism began to increase one of the fascinating things is that the phrase standard of living first appeared for the first time in history you measured how good your life was by how many objects you possessed when you think about it that's actually a very strange idea you couldn't just buy anything what was what wasn't tasteful was discussed at length in the many in various new household guides and magazines John Ruskin the leading art critic and social theorist impressed on Victorian consumers the importance of making the right choices good taste is essentially a moral quality what we like determines what we are and to teach taste is inevitably to form character yet while the Victorians fretted about abstract notions of morality they were oblivious to the real dangers that came from things they had welcomed into their houses every room in the Victorian home was filled with hidden killers and one of the most dangerous places was the drawing-room [Music] the Victorians were really rejecting the idea of the eighteenth-century classicism the restraint the delicacy the white walls that was although that they wanted clutter they wanted color they wanted accessory they really furnished to show that for them color and clutter and objects that was wealth and that was that was importance and that was britches [Music] one thing that particularly indicated both good taste and status was wallpaper the richer the pattern and the darker more vivid the color the better why because with the introduction of gas lighting for the first time in history there was enough light in the house for ordinary people to have and enjoy intense color on their walls as a result there was something of a wallpaper craze manuals like castles household guide which told the Victorians how to do everything outlined principles of good taste and told them which patterns of wallpaper to buy they were influencing a massive market wallpaper sales had shot up from around 1 million pieces a year in 1834 to 32 million by 1874 castles even gifts what its cause its theory of color it describes his rules for the artistic appreciation in dress in furniture and it recommends green it calls it a color of repose says the eye experiences a healthy and peculiarly greatful impression from this color as opposed to something like yellowish red which it says is the preference of impetuous robust men and savage nations a particularly brilliant green known as Sheila's green was all the rage she'll was the swedish scientist who first mixed the pigment to produce an intensely vivid color that didn't fade its incredible popularity meant that it was used in everything from carpets Barrymore's candles and children's toys but most of all it was used in industrial quantities in wallpaper there was one strange coincidence as wallpaper sales escalated so did reports of unexplained deaths and illnesses in the home but there was nothing mysterious about it the magic ingredient that was giving the wallpaper its rich green hue was arsenic these were samples of what would be considered tearful wallpapers to have in a Victorian home this on the walls would have been loaded with arsenic actually in the printing of the book it's also used or cynical dyes see this book that you've shown me now has asked the confused miss Christmas there's quite a lot of arsenic in this it's not I don't believe what you're saying but could you prove it it's fairies you do if I use this instrument which is a portable XRF it tells us what contaminants metallic contaminants are present and items basically consisted offices got large amounts of copper in it we've got large amounts of arsenic in it yes the actual salts used in this pigment or copper arsenic in this book probably I'll wash my hands afterwards modern science can prove the Victorian wallpaper contained arsenic but this danger wasn't fully understood at the time to confuse matters further the symptoms of arsenic poisoning were very similar to cholera which had been rampant in Britain in living memory the immediate effects would be of pain swelling of the esophagus very dry throat and difficulty in swallowing and then what's described is agonizing abdominal pains as the whole digestive tract is affected by the arsenic vomiting diarrhea and sounds terribly unpleasant and then people would die which was said to be quite a relief because it was such an agonizing way to die newspaper headlines continued to report mysterious illnesses and deaths and links were made with arsenic in the second half of the 19th century the newspapers are full of cases like this one six-month-old child dies as a result of chewing on a piece of emerald green wallpaper but even if you hadn't eaten the wallpaper you weren't safe in fact the wallpaper was endangering the health of the nation in another hidden and much more insidious way thanks to a chemical reaction poisonous fumes are thought to have infiltrated the very air they were breathing there's a lot of bit about the production of Arsenic gases from the wallpaper the actual surface of the wallpaper predictive lock wallpapers could come off and your house would be covered in arsenical dust but also in Victorian houses which weren't centrally heated the relatively damp you put dumped together with wallpaper paste and cellulose which is another wallpaper itself and you got fungal growth and as many fungi can actually roll out lies those are cynical salts and they're volatile form of arsenic and they are highly toxic these things were billowing out arsenic in the home in which obviously the windows were hardly ever opened because of the smog they sat there in this lovely ferg of arsenic thinking they're in this perfect virtuous healthy home it doesn't actually matter how the arsenic is absorbed into the body whether you breathe it in whether it comes in through the skin or the other membranes or whether you actually eat it it actually has a very similar effect because it's effective via the blood stream so the arsenic gets into the bloodstream and travels around the body but one of the problems with the slower arsenic poisoning of a small amount over a longer time is that it could cause very vague symptoms and obviously if you're being poisoned by something in a particular room of the house and when you left that room you got a bit better it would could come and go and so it was much harder to differentiate it from other illnesses thought around at the time some doctors began to question the use of arsenic in wallpaper as more and more mystery deaths were reported in the home The Lancet too took up the cause there appears good reason for believing that a very large amount of sickness and mortality among all classes is attributable to this cause and that it may probably account for many of the mysterious diseases of the present day which so continually baffle all medical skill in 1856 a couple in Birmingham reported to their doctor dr. Heinz that they were suffering from inflamed eyes headaches and sore throats even their pet parrot was drooping they decided to go on holiday to the seaside and their symptoms disappeared they suspected something in their house and they had recently applied bright green wallpaper to two rooms at home dr. Heinz wondered if that alone could be responsible for their ailments people went to the seaside and took the waters and took the spa what effectively they were doing is moving out of a toxic environment into a healthy diluted environment where you had fresh air water that came from a known source not relying on what was in a concentrated area within the property they moved away from a toxic environment what's really astounding is how much arsenic there was in a Victorian drawing-room when you add up all the materials that contained arsenic pigment certainly we know that it was a huge amount of arsenic in say Victorian living room which had a hundred square metres surface area could contain up to 2.5 kilograms of arsenic doped er Heinz along with some other medical practitioners became an outspoken critic of the use of arsenic pigment in Germany arsenical war papers had been banned but not in the UK the war people manufacturers didn't want people to think there's anything wrong with their products and they say The Lancet and the British Medical Journal fought a long campaign to bring this in the public for so there was quite a lot of speed to what was going on some doctors and newspapers called on the British government to ban the poisonous paper but others were quick to belittle the claims of the killer wallpaper some manufacturers even offered to eat it to prove how safe it was one of Britain's most celebrated wallpaper designers was William Morris a leading light of the Arts and Crafts movement he was also one of the fiercest critics of the heartless industrialists of this period but what is not well known about this champion of handicraft is that he was a director of the biggest arsenic producing mine in the world Devin great consoles William Morris was making with his money from arsenic that's quite a surprise isn't it because of course we associate really Morris as being you know this leader of the Arts and Crafts movement as someone who's you know going back to place it's going to look back to natural things but he's got this mind that potentially is certainly selling arsenic whether he's using it as wallpapers or sometimes we said there was enough arsenic produced from that mine to kill the entire planet and every creature on earth some of the people who came out with the processes had vested interests in other locations that they would own a snick mines they would own areas where it was in their interest to include arsenic into payments dyes whatever they don't really Morris ever accept that he was doing this or did he continue to deny it well there's a interesting letter there was a customer complaining that the wallpaper was poisoning him and his family and basically William Morris said there was witch fever so that was this for sovereigns we have which in other words he thought he was being accused of something that just wasn't sure well he was just saying it was these doctors were saying the new article wallpapers were killing people and damaging people's health and he was just saying you know it's it's mumbo-jumbo basically what he was saying contrary to Morris's claims the evidence building up became impossible to deny but it would take intervention from the very top before things started to change one of the tipping points of that recognition was when Queen Victoria herself had had wallpaper of she'll dream and she had a diplomat who actually came to stay with her who fell ill overnight and she wasn't the records show that she was quite put out to be perfectly honest she'd been stood up early in the morning and he hadn't turned up but axes the poor chap had actually killed over overnight he was actually effectively poisoned by the arsenic in the wallpaper she was a little skeptical about it but then they actually came out in the papers and the world actually quite a lot of publications around that time was actually that she done that it was then that step change in maybe we need to think and how would regulate this unbelievably the use of arsenic and wallpaper was never officially banned but as consumers understood its danger they stopped buying these wallpapers and forced commercial practice to change Morris wallpapers and other astute manufacturers started to advertise their product as arsenic-free certainly by 1872 even the star guides had switched to safer printing but we'll never know how many died a slow death through the prevalence of arsenic in Victorian products I cannot see that having this amount of arsenic dust fully around a Victorian home wouldn't lead to chronic health problems it's a as a class 1 carcinogen is a human carcinogen so years of exposure to this would have led the cancer is basically the Victorian ideal or perhaps fantasy of domesticity was that the lady of the house should be as Charles Dickens describes it in the Mystery of Edwin Drood the ministering angel of domestic bliss Victorian women were encouraged to make their home a reassuring sanctuary for their husbands away from the jealousies cares and dangers of working life the idea of the angel of the house was obviously a literary creation but it tapped in completely to what the Victorians essentially wanted it was a movement away from the fact that in the 18th century usually father and mother had pitched in together in the business with a professionalization the growth of factories the home was away from the place of work so the home became this ideal place of perfection and taste this this bubble enclosed bubble of purity as the home became an ideal it needed to be protected and nurtured and therefore buying things for the home creating things for the home came to be seen as the woman's occupation the men went out there conquering the Empire the women stayed at home and kept things pure [Music] women were expected not only to create the perfect home the lady of the house had to measure up as well our next danger in this house is in the bedroom the pursuit of this feminine ideal wasn't entirely safe lurking in many beautifying products were harmful toxins [Music] part of being the ideal Victorian woman was looking just right whatever your physique one of these came in handy in fact this was essential corsets kept everything under control and they meant self reserve and that was vital to the Victorian woman because the opposite was just excess and freedom and flesh flying everywhere and once he did that what the world might fall down [Music] Sarah Nicole looks after one of the biggest corset collections in the country so tell me about all the different layers we can see here what's going on first of all we've got the chemise underneath so you would never have worn your core sit next to your skin the corset predates the bra its function was to support the chest and help take the weight of up to 14 pounds of clothing would have had a petticoat as well that's sort of five garments before yeah you've even got to your outerwear it is yes the Symington factory manufactured corsets that were affordable for everybody they did all of their own artwork and printing for all their Box Tops for their corsets that's just beautiful it may look beautiful but women were unwittingly paying a terrible price in the 1860s and 70s Corsa tree became increasingly extreme by the mid 19th century the ideal female form the corseted female form was everywhere in newspapers magazines journals aimed at women and this celebrity the actresses had it the the dancers had it but particularly fashion plates had it this impossible figure I mean they were drawn simply because no woman would look like that what kind of courses and how restrictive they were depended on your age your class your occupation and her fashionable you were it was recommended that a corset was to be worn at all times and there was no escape not even in the colonies Simon's made this to market directly outrages that were going to tropical regions so they were either going with their man or to get their man it's called the ventilated corset for obvious reasons it has the center section removed they're all women wearing this in all parts of the British Empire yeah whatever the weather yes and you were regarded as a loose woman if you didn't wear your corset it demonstrated their character and it demonstrated that they were fine and upright citizens and you know fit for the British Empire these robust cages of whale bone and steel were turned into potential killers by one surprisingly small technological advance the metal eyelet what it allows people if they want to too tight lace their course it without fabric pulling away the metal eyelet made it easier to get the look because it was possible to lace tightly without the material tearing as it previously would have done there was a fashion for wearing very very very tight policies I mean it's fascinating you see in photographs the fabric poles in a way that we would think means it doesn't fit a tight lacing is something that a minority of people did and that is to get your waist as small as you possibly can they used to do this by lightly lacing their ties of course it tighter and tighter some women would keep their corsets on day and night to train their bodies [Music] so what are the effects of a corset on the body in the long term well if I could just show you here the position of the normal organs so the liver for example our largest internal organ sits underneath the ribs on the right and so it's a large wedge-shaped organ that sits here under the ribs and so in a corset which brings the ribs in very tightly to give the typical small waisted outline the liver gets squashed upwards and it presses against the ribs and in fact there are specimens of livers taken from women who have died who've worn tight corsets actually have ridges on them where the ribs have made indentations in the surface of the liver because it's been so tight [Music] and another organ that may be affected by a tight corset is a stomach that sits here it underneath the ribcage and so if the ribcage was pulled in by the corset the stomach is pushed downwards into the abdominal cavity and that would then have an effect on the rest of the abdominal organs which would be pushed down this is a pregnancy corset from 1885 some women even wore corsets when pregnant a particular choice came for women about the course it is what when they fell pregnant because many husbands complain they didn't want their their baby's head shaped and molded but there were women who continued to wear corsets through pregnancy which you know there's no no way in it at all that is possibly good for the baby one of the problems with corsets after pregnancy particularly women had a lot of babies was that of prolapse of the uterus the pelvic floor muscles haven't been weakened during childbirth and then a very tight corset that increases the pressure in the abdomen forcing all the organs down so that would have been a very unwanted side effect of wearing tight corsets now it's my turn a body a little bit tighter whether you can feel that I've got you yeah I can feel it yep I confess I felt delighted to have a smaller waist result I can see why they did it now 24 inches look 24 3/4 the Victorian household guides even advised on suitable exercises for a lady I'm just exhausted I'm cetera I'm not really that unfit honestly or am i we're going to use sport science equipment with Matt Ferber to measure the effect of the corset on my body yep I'm happy you happy yeah first I have to give him a baseline of fitness without the corset I exercise for six minutes [Music] now Matt monitors my vital signs with the corset on first how it affects me at rest and I repeat the same exercise with Matt measuring my heart rate and airflow [Music] halfway through and Matt's already seeing the changes [Music] I feel close to fainting and it takes two minutes for my head to clearer and I'm not even tight laced okay okay last 10 seconds excellent you're free so what happened what can science reveal about the effects of a corset so in terms of the rate in which you're breathing so even at rest you can see so you've got the red line is when you're wearing the corset the blue lines it's not wearing it when you're not when your corset so you see even at rest when you're sitting down you're breathing in the corset around about you know twenty-three twenty-four breaths per minute whereas when you didn't have the corset on you were down about fourteen breasts a minute so it shows that even at rest of course it's really restricting and then when it actually comes to wash right when you do any exercise and we can see where your figures you know with the corset on your tidal volume so the amount of air getting every breath is a lot lower so you're breathing approximately 200 to 300 mils less every single breath with the corset on gosh yeah so that's why at the end I felt like I was really fighting to not to get in there absolutely you know really with these figures you can really see the impact the course is the restriction of course is having you're basically hyperventilating within the course it it's kind of what's happening because you'll be you're breathing an awful lot faster you know ten over ten breaths per minute it's an extra 25% faster wearing a corset I've proved it's damaging but could it be a killer that chronic under perfusion not getting enough air down into the bottom of the lungs could cause problems it predisposes to infections like pneumonia and that was something that a very tight corset warned for many hours a day could cause problems with if a woman had an underlying problem it could exacerbate it so for example if a young girl had rickets from vitamin D deficiency to have soft bones that were still developing and they could be distorted very much by wearing a tight corset there are stories of the ribs breaking and piercing the lung underneath which could be fatal as the century wore on the corset became the focus of a huge debate women's possibilities for activity became much larger over the 19th century by the end of the 19th century it was there was nothing unvirtuous in going around on your bicycle in walking freely and so this vide wasn't very practical for them to be wearing corsets Erina simply didn't work and increasingly women began to say these are pointless they're just getting in the way you know I spending hours in the morning getting myself into the corset when I could be doing something far more useful it really also coincided with the growth of the votes for women the idea that women were equal citizens so if they're equal citizens demanding the vote they shouldn't be treated as some kind of excessive ornament that are there to be looked at and they're to be admired and are ruining the health just so they look white for men the campaign for change was spearheaded by the rationale dress Society established in 1881 Constance wild wife of Oscar edited the rational dress Gazette the rational dress Society protests against the introduction of any fashion in dress that either deforms the figure impedes the movement of the body or in any way tends to injure health by the 1890s some manufacturers had started to respond to demands for looser clothing yet one thing will probably never disappear the temptation to conform to an ideal of beauty whatever the cost why did women caring wearing corsets well for exactly the same reason as I was delighted to have a 24-inch waist it was psychologically rewarding even if physically it could take its toll the idea of that s-shaped figure we are completely in thrall to it even now so I don't think that we can really look back on the Victorians and say oh my goodness weren't they silly fainting when they sang falling all over the place because they wore corsets I don't think we can say without necessarily that far away I'm on the trail of the next household danger I'm heading to the kitchen courses weren't just warmed by middle-class burn they were also warned by their servants as they carried out household tasks it almost beggars belief but at least those servants benefited from the proliferation of new gadgets designed to make their lives easier and safer well sort of this was a brave new world where the ingenious Victorian inventor felt he had the answers to any domestic problem but many of these inventions were difficult to use and proved to be dangerous and people were untrained in how to use them by the mid 1870s the Victorians were bringing services into the home piping in water and trying out new gas appliances and gadgets and of all the new inventions available what could be more desirable in these dark damp houses than something that offered heat and light gas was to open a whole new chapter of Victorian household catastrophes what we had in the past was everybody would be congregated around a single lamp and it would be either oil or a candle or something else and then all of a sudden people didn't want to live on top of each other all the time we wanted to find better ways of doing it and it was towards the end of the the Victorian area that they started bringing gas lighting lighting that was actually capable of light in a whole room it was a massive step forward it was their four greatest innovation you could have a room that was completely lit they had coal gas said something it was called wood gas and they had another material called a water gas now these were highly poisonous there's no control there was no Scott it was just gas the worst killer was because you couldn't actually smell it so you'd have no idea until it was too late - basically he would just keel over and that would be the be the end of you in the second half of the 19th century the papers everything from the Worcester Evening News to the Western Gazette a full of stories of people dying horribly these aren't headline cases they're just little snippets that gives the facts and figures so for example in the Manchester Evening News in 1886 there's a story of five boys suffocating in a loft or the this one from the Sheffield independent 1872 the lady was found confined in a bedroom with her infant in its nose and it says she must have unconsciously deranged the joint of the gas stove thus permitting an escape of gas all three were found apparently lifeless but why was such cases so widespread it may seem obvious to us now but at the time the dangers of gas were not known to the man in the street and the gas company's adverts didn't help matters some of the major gas companies coming out with misnomers that gas was actually good for people that you could actually have a room full of gas and walk in there with a naked light and it would be perfectly safe gas companies were popping up all over the place you couldn't walk a block in and and without seeing a gas company the rivalry was just huge but of course with rivalry comes cost-cutting what you also had at the time was unscrupulous activities going on between gas suppliers where they would actually sabotage their their opponents or their competitors by actually dropping the pressure to save money companies would reduce their own gas supply to customers at night the gas lab would actually just flicker away and then blow out in the middle of the night and then the gases just seep into your home and he wouldn't be waking up in the morning it was the heart of the industrial period they wanted everything new manufactured to be the scene to be at the cutting edge of what was going on and that was then how they drove innovation through making something engineering something if it wasn't engineered it wasn't bit the speed of change was breathtaking but there was neither the time nor the will to test these products that would be sold to millions of consumers one of the most brilliant contraptions in this age of scientific progress was a system that could provide warmth throughout the whole house a massive improvement on open coal fires and drafty chimneys gas central heating was a huge thing in 1800s they came up with the idea of a sealed system ovid it would heat water exactly same as a steam train basically a huge cylinder it was very volatile the pressure inside these boilers was just absolutely phenomenal they were running them all around houses you could have 10 12 15 16 radiators on each system but of course you could be sitting down the Vanir Vanir lunch and this steam well doesn't open you could be tucking into your turtle soup and the next thing is a huge explosion and you'll be leaving the building without opening the door the pressure was just huge so it was only ever gonna end up in in one story really it was gonna be an accident and people will die the main problem was that they didn't understand the dangers of what they were doing gas and cast-iron hadn't been used in this way in the home before when they weren't to doing the casting it was at the very forefront of that technology of understanding that witnesses and flaws in that car in that casting could actually cause problems further down the line the inventive Victorian engineer having tackled heat and light now turned his attention to cooking stoves what could be so dangerous about a stove like this with an open system when you add the coal and the massive flu with a smoke pouring up the chimney ventilation was superb because the air would run through the kitchen straight up the chimney take all the smoke away but when they sort of encompassed it into a sealed container and problems were pressure and that problems were getting rid of the smoke because there's the the actual ventilation and the draft there wasn't one to go through the system to take the smoke away so inevitably the kitchens become really smoky and of course this could lead to anything to suffocation if you avoided suffocating in the smoky kitchen you still had a potential problem they made sealed units and poured hot water into them and used them sort of that like the modern-day kettle and of course this was a boil as a boiling pot and of course there's no release valves or anything like that of course these stoves were just exploding it was like a small time bomb there's totally seen eliminated they didn't understand the pressures and what happened when you introduced oxygen and you had these huge huge catastrophic explosions in kitchens towards the end of the Victorian era a new power source gradually came into play they were starting to turn away from gas because it was so volatile and go towards electricity basically but Alex just he was a killer as well it wasn't hundred percent safe when they were you know first coming up with these ideas of light bulbs and because you mix electricity with gas so you bring in electric lights and we've still got the gas Kaka and these gas cookers were left on you know the joint still corroded broke down and let gas escape and of course you'd come down in the morning into any wonderful new electric light Don and that's the first thing that explodes his is your gas cooker so the two of them that they weren't to go together is it it was a recipe for disaster again it wasn't until 1923 that any safety regulations were brought in but the benefits of a warm cozy home meant that most were willing to risk the consequences invention was running a hundred miles an hour and we just weren't quick enough to keep up with all the fitters over your Bruins skilled enough to keep up with it but the amount of deaths that happen through negligence not just through not understanding what the material here using was huge [Music] I'm leaving the dangers of the kitchen and I'm going to the one place in the house where you'd think health and safety would be particularly cherished the nursery to seek out the next hidden killer [Music] the new consumer culture even extended as far as providing entertainment for children surely that wouldn't be a problem would it alarmingly despite all the progress a hundred and fifty four thousand infants under the age of one died annually between 1880 and 1890 and so a surviving child was an important one and their interests were indulged charles's was expanded more than ever before I mean girls were home for a very long time virtuous young ladies Lord Shaftesbury saying children shouldn't work excessively in factories the idea of childhood became sac result in the Victorian world this meant a new consumer market to target manufacturers absolutely poured goods for the child into the shops and we will snap them up this was the time when Christmas was essentially invented as a child's festival at the time when children receive presents and children was spoiled [Music] but it was this indulgence that was now endangering children and toys were the problem anything that was colored or pigmented would have had high levels of a toxic metal in it and even if I was white it wasn't see if those large levels of lead in white painted objects lead is a very poisonous substance and there's no amount of lead that is safe for your body even the tiniest amount of it can be detrimental and obviously children being much smaller and also because they're developing and later damages the nervous system are much more susceptible to lead poisoning and unfortunately it's typically children who were poisoned by lead partly because it was used for things like lead soldiers and for painting children's toys but also because as the children's habit of licking and putting things in their mouths anything they would chew or lick or would potentially flake off on them and they get handled put on their hands then put her hands and oh nice you know little flakes are led unlike a lot of poisons which have an unpleasant taste lead is not unpleasant and so just by licking it wouldn't put a child off so why on earth were the Victorians putting lead in paint it's been known to be poisonous since Roman times quite simply it was and remains the best preserver of wood they had no idea that its poison could be transferred from a toy into a child's body some of the first abnormalities that might be found would be developmental ones so the child may not develop as normal and may have behavioral problems things that might have been put down to temper tantrums or nowadays something like an attention deficit disorder may actually have been due to lead poisoning [Music] almost impossible to identify if you can't test levels of lead because it's just the way in which that particular child is developing and who knows what their potential would have been had they not been exposed to lead LEED wasn't just brought into the house on objects it was in the very fabric of the home on painted surfaces Laird was ubiquitous in the Victorian house for providing white gloss paints that you might find on every wooden painted item would have been used with LED we have a look at this piece of woodwork and see what's present and this is well we can see immediately is quite all Laird it's 3000 ppm of Laird not because it's been stripped it's probably just against traces of all LED paint before the old pin broke was taken off in the late 19th century lead poisoning was rife but it was difficult to detect lead poisoning cause anemia and it's often described that people had a gray pallor as at a very unhealthy look but one way which is identified by physician dr. Henry Burton in 1840 was something called Burton's lines which was a bluey gray line at the base of the gums just at the top of the teeth they gave a very characteristic mark that was a sign of lead poisoning although by the time you identified that line it was probably too late to undo some of the effects that the lead is likely to have had by then despite the gruesome evidence the government did nothing it was not until the 1920s that white LED was banned in indoor paint products in Sweden Czechoslovakia Austria Poland Spain Finland and Norway but not Britain amazingly it wasn't until the 1970s more than a hundred years after the problem had been identified that the British government finally passed legislation to control the lead content of household paint even today lead paint in old houses still poses a risk but there was an even bigger threat I'm on the hunt for our last and possibly our greatest hidden killer and again one invisible to the Victorian eye infant mortality rates in Victorian Britain were terrifyingly high as many as 15% of all babies died in their first year of life and often the cause was an unexpected one mommy's little helper baby signs the idea that babies could be studied and developed in the most healthy way was the new order of the day in the 18th century the idea was that God took the children he wanted there was very high infant mortality and it was up to God so you just let it go in the 19th century it was much about science and women could be seen as responsible and they were judged by how many of their children stayed alive just like the Queen you had nine children kept them all alive who lived long and happy lives the relationship between traditional ideas and the new scientific approach became increasingly fraught around how to feed babies to comprehend how this domestic danger had such an impact requires understanding the Victorian attitudes to baby rearing breastfeeding had long been rather and popular in the high rarest aqua see the Queens didn't breastfeed it was something that I was requested women simply didn't do they gave the job to wet nurses big fat jolly wet nurse rather than the Victorian woman who was supposed to be much more delicate much more refined and much more restrained this attitude filtered into the new swelling middle classes one figure loomed large over the household guides to bringing up baby mrs. Beaton and it was her they turned to for advice mrs. Beeton gives two chapters in her book which was enormous ly influential to baby and child care and it tells you all the useful tips about breastfeeding like drink lots of beer although it does they stay off the gin but after that it then moves on to what to do if for whatever reason you cannot breastfeed your child any new idea needs explain in detail feeding babies by bottle was a new idea the problem with this advice it takes up much more space in the book so it seems as though it is actually recommending bottle feeding or as it was known in the 19th century rearing by hand but many saw this as mrs. Beeton promoting bottle feeding her perceived support and the marketing of babies bottles put huge pressure on women to abandon breastfeeding and there were these bottles that have these kind of fantastic empire names the empire bottle they're really suggesting that for a woman to choose the bottle I mean brilliant marketing ploy to choose the bottle made her a much better citizen of empire she was essentially doing the right thing for her children but was she could this be hidden killer [Music] dr. Matthew a verson is a microbiologist he's going to use his scientific expertise to cast an eye on this Victorian innovation I have brought you this this is a Victorian babies bottle what's what's wrong with this I think the obvious thing just looking at it because of this bend on the side of it it's very difficult to actually clean away any residue that might be forming in here and also the stopper being made of rubber and the tube in there all porous materials so they would accumulate residue of milk and any bacteria that might be in that would permeate into the porous material and you'd end up very quickly with bacteria growing in that there's the bottle and then there is either a rubber or a animal skin nipple which says mrs. Beaton's book you tie on and then you don't have to take off for the two or three weeks it lasts so a part from outside it never gets washed sounds disgusting but what are the dangers of using porous materials with milk Matthews designed an experiment he contaminates a piece of porous cork and a piece of non porous plastic with a bacteria that would have been common in Victorian times he gives them each a quick wash and drops them into a liquid that mimics the contents of the Victorian bottle the shaping of the incubator introduces oxygen into the samples which makes them grow up faster and it also heats them up to a body temperature 37 degrees just gives us a quicker result whilst we wait for the result what was going into the Victorian baby bottle breast pumps existed so mother's milk and a nutritious formula according to the food manufacturers the things that were recommended I mean what mrs. Beaton's doctor calls farinaceous foods which are foods were there their formula that sold in shops but he's basically flour you know the children didn't thrive for very obvious reasons to us that they have an idea about bacteria in the 1890s say when this feeding bottle was invented what's around about that time they've probably scientists are going to have made discoveries about the link between the bacterial colonization of substances and disease so there are many examples of that for example the cholera epidemics in London were stamped out by separation of sewage and water and and that had happened by that time but it's just whether that information had permeated down to the domestic level so what does our experiment proved okay these are the results of the samples are inoculated last night you can clearly see that the one with the cork is much much denser you get a much denser growth than on the plastic this just shows that there were many more bacteria on the cork than on the plastic and the bacteria have come from the pores within the cork it illustrates the idea that when you have a porous material it's soaked so bacteria even in a few hours you're going to get enough bacteria to cause an infection so I mean what does this mean for our babies bottle yeah I think they didn't really understand that porous materials would retain the bacteria even if they were washed over the surface like this core could be and so therefore if new media's put on new milk new food it's going to take up the bacteria again and cause this effect Victorian Britain was alive with killer diseases that sound tropical now but will common them things like dysentery and typhoid these are all very very serious intestinal diseases passed on through dirty water which was then drunk the cycle completes itself and you end up with serious diarrhea infections and for a small baby dehydration very very quickly would lead to death within 48 hours absolutely the lack of knowledge of transmission of germs in water meant that bottle-fed children were more at risk in addition to that there are lots of bacteria that live in the mouth and in the upper respiratory tract in the back of the throat these bacteria are fine if they're there but if they were to get inhaled into the lungs there could cause pneumonia and of course when you're sucking on something like this there's a potential for any bacteria like that to effectively be inhaled in small droplets if they get into the lungs they can cause a lower respiratory tract infection what we call pneumonia and of course infant pneumonia was the biggest cause of death in in babies and those bacteria from the upper respiratory tract getting down there causing that pneumonia could potentially be lethal again very quickly and with no cure so that's not just one bacteria it's sort of one danger there's loads of them dozens of them we're all covered in billions trillions of bacteria what we provide in here is a place for those bacteria to get an itch to grow multiply into excessive quantities and then an access routes straw into a very vulnerable individual and that's why these things undoubtedly would have killed many children so the dirtiest most bacteria-ridden deadliest object of all went straight into the mouths of babes doctors came to understand the dangers of bacteria and its growth a step forward was made in 1894 with Alan and ham breeze double-ended feeder bottle the design had a teat at one end and a valve at the other this enabled the flow of milk to be constant but more importantly it was easy to clean and therefore safer despite this the old dangerous bottles sold well into the 20th century it may be true that our hidden killers the poisonous wallpaper killer corsets dangerous paint exploding stoves and infested babies bottles damaged the Victorians prized ideal of the safe and secure home yet this was an extraordinary age so full of innovations even if the was a price to pay history as ever is a case of two steps forward and one step back and although progress was not without sacrifice we still have their legacy we still live in their houses we may think that we're over regulated today that health and safety has gone too far but when we think about what things were like just over a hundred years ago we should be grateful that the Victorians not only pioneered new products but also protections against them it makes me wonder what we're oblivious to today [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Absolute History

Views: 4,279,912

Rating: 4.8316212 out of 5

Keywords: timeline, history history documentary funny history fun history school, hidden killers of the victorian home, hidden killers

Id: K3Jef7i7v1U

Length: 58min 58sec (3538 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 06 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Hotfishy]

Just finished watching this on youtube! I felt pretty sad at the end how people are dying without knowing why...

[u/Warioworld]

Oh I've seen some of these before, her name is Dr. Suzannah Lipscomb and more of these episodes are available on Amazon if you have prime. Not a bad watch if you have some time to kill I think the are called "hidden killers" or something like that.