Why Victorian Homes Were Toxic | Hidden Killers | Absolute History

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] 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 they 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 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 her feels kind of fantastic in the 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 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 apart 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 that 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 its silk 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 suck in 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 [Music] despite this the old dangerous bottles sold well into the 20th century you

Channel: Absolute History

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Keywords: history history documentary funny history fun history school, timeline, childs play, absolute history, full length documentaries, documentary movies - topic, history documentary, hidden killers of the victorian home, suzannah lipscomb, suzannah lipscomb documentary, suzannah lipscomb hidden killers, victorian documentaries, victorian documentary youtube, victorian documentary bbc, worst jobs in history victorian, victorian age history, history documentary victorian

Id: Im4iekcPlc0

Length: 16min 35sec (995 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 17 2019