What the Romans didn't warn us about.

[Eric The Viking]

Copper pipes in another thread reminded me...

I don't get enough time to read these days, except on holiday.

For two years, I took Tom Paine's "The Rights of Man" away with me (fits nicely into my camera bag), but now I've gone all tabletty I can take 'weightier*' tomes. This year it was Gibbon's "Decline and Fall".

Being a bit of an intellectual coward, I tend to carefully read the introductions, etc., first off, as I usually need all the help I can get with the rest. I have two Kindle editions. The free one is OK but dense. The paid-for one is good, because it has commentary. In particular, there's a good section of modern critique of Gibbon at the back, including alternative theories (Gibbon's premise is largely that the Empire collapsed through moral decay).

My favourite modern hypothesis is that the Roman Empire collapsed through lead poisoning. Apparently the Romans liked cooking up fruit syrups, 'defrutum' and 'sapa', which were used as sweeteners in a range of other foodstuffs, including wine, and often in cooking. They were made in lead-lined pans, and the hypothesis points out that the acid of the fruit would dissolve the lead, making lead acetate. This in turn easily brings toxic lead into the body.

The proponents point to chemical analysis of bones from Herculaneum, revealing lead at 84ppm, well into the range where it does damage. They contrast it with bones from ancient Greece, at 3ppm.

So did the Romans actually all go mad as hatters (or was that mercury?)?

Wikipedia says, "Symptoms include abdominal pain, confusion, headache, anaemia, irritability..." That would cover quite a few emperors, I'd say, and anyway, madness might well arise from continual headaches and stomach cramps.

If such a dreadful fate befell Roman society, I'm wondering if there is an equivalent in modern, Western life. I doubt it's chemical, but it might well be psychological. For example, might we be driving ourselves slowly mad with the insistent "turn left" of the girl in the satnav, or the buzz of modern 'low energy' lightbulbs. Could we be vulnerable to the ubiquity of Marvel-comic-derived action movies?

Anyone else worried by this, or, to quote Douglas Adams, is it just 'normal paranoia'?

E.

*research published two years ago suggested that the data stored on the entire internet amounted to about the weight of an average strawberry. It didn't say how ripe the strawberry was, nor if it was being used to make defrutum, either.

 

[RogerS]

......
Wikipedia says, "Symptoms include abdominal pain, confusion, headache, anaemia, irritability..." .....

That would cover quite a few forum members as well :lol:

 

[monkeybiter]

It's a very interesting discovery. The obvious question is how widely spread was this practise? Was it 'just' the well-to-do, or was it common practise. And then there's the range of the empire, encompassing many different cultures. It could have wiped out vast numbers if everyone had wanted or been able to afford it.

 

[Reggie]

I didn't think the roman empire actually collapsed per say, just assimilated itself into it's various respective cultures, where did the roman catholic church come from?

 

[CHJ]

Lead water storage and distribution is still ongoing, anyone living in older properties that have not had their mains water supply pipes and internal drinking water plumbing renewed might well be advised to run the cold tap for a few minutes every morning before filling the kettle.
Something my grandparents did automatically, and something I only realised why many years later.

Just like making Jam in those nice shinny Aluminium Jam Kettles of old, or cleaning the Aluminium Saucepans with a rhubarb pudding every now and again.

 

[Eric The Viking]

It's a very interesting discovery. The obvious question is how widely spread was this practise? Was it 'just' the well-to-do, or was it common practise. And then there's the range of the empire, encompassing many different cultures. It could have wiped out vast numbers if everyone had wanted or been able to afford it.

There's actually a table in the relevant appendix to Gibbon, guesstimating lead uptake for the various social classes:

Aristocrats: 250ug/day
Plebs: 35ug/day
Slaves: 15 ug/day

That might make sense - the leadership certainly collapsed!

Actually, other ideas make more sense, especially the one where rising centralized taxes to support Rome and its bureaucracy collapsed the peripheral economies (Mises et al). I think that's happening now in the UK...

E.
(a fan of L. v. Mises, incidentally)

 

[Richard T]

Can't remember his name - Professor Iain ? (young, Scottish Geologist) did an hours programme on Beeb 4 a couple of years ago about how much lead the Romans put away.

As well as the pipes/ducts and dubious cooking practices, he said that they deliberately added it to wine as a non - fermentable 'sweetener'.

 

[AES]

@Eric T V:

Kind of "off topic but on topic" - I remember reading some years ago about a family who went on holiday to Mexico and brought home a pottery jug with them which, because they liked it, came in for pretty much daily use. Mainly for fruit jiuces and squashes if I rember the story correctly. After quite some period the youngest member of the family suffered most of the symptoms described above (I'm not sure about the madness though!) and was eventually diagnosed as having a high level of lead in his bloodstream, with the rest of the family suffering also, but to a lesser extent. It seems that the pottery jug was glazed with a material which included lead.

And as we all know, lead-based paints are a real no-no these days.

So perhaps lead poisioning as a root cause of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire is not so far-fetched - but personally I think it likely had much more to do with Mr. "Bonga-Bonga" Berlussconi's great great great grandfather (i.e. moral decline, as per Gibbon).

;-)

AES

 

[SammyQ]

Ah! So thst's how Bunga Berlussconi got the 'lead' in his pencil! Gets coat, leaves.....

Sam

 

[AES]

Nice one Sam!

AES

 

[Woodchips2]

I had a friend who was an industrial chemist. He bought a cottage in the hills of Mid-Wales in lead-mining country and did it up as a holiday retreat. It had no mains supplies but he found a fresh-water spring above the cottage, built a catch-pit and piped the water down to the cottage. After using it for a year he thought he ought to check the purity of the supply and found it was heavily contaminated with lead! He got over the problem by building a settlement chamber but was very red-faced over the incident.
Regards Keith

 

[No skills]

Interesting, I'll have to check our supply pipe or test the water for lead.

I recall as a child my father suddenly going round and chucking out the old aluminium saucepans for no known reason (well to me at the time) and buying my mum some pyrex (or similar) ones - much to her displeasure

 

[Phil Pascoe]

I chucked all my aluminium pans about 1986 - I mentioned this to a friend of mine, a retired chemistry teacher about ten years ago. He replied that that was several years after he ditched his.

 

[AndyT]

According to the Alzheimer's Society, who presumably have read all the scholarly papers, the suggested link to aluminium as a cause is not proven. So no need to throw out your pans.

http://www.alzheimers.org.uk/site/scripts/documents_info.php?documentID=102

 

[CHJ]

Seem to remember some serious health implications after a water treatment plant at Camelford got a delivery of Aluminium sulfate wrong and contaminated the water supplies.
Apart from the damage done to the water supply system by the generation of acids that stripped lead and other deposits from piping etc. I believe autopsies some years later as part of inquests found very high levels of aluminium in the brains of people from the area.

I accept the above is a whole order of magnitude different to using Alluminium cooking vessels and kettles in the home but I for one now try to avoid them.

 

[Eric The Viking]

The Camelford incident happened when I was working for BBC regional news in Bristol. It was the patch adjacent to ours (South West/Plymouth), so we covered it, albeit not to the same depth as the Plymouth news team did.

IIRC, someone dumped a delivery into the wrong place, allowing the Aluminium Sulphate to go straight into the drinking water.

There's a bowdlerized version on Wikipedia, here. I'm slightly shocked that they say there's been no systematic long-term monitoring of those affected. Never mind the implications for the individuals concerned, what a wasted opportunity!

Several deaths are almost certainly a result of the poisoning. At least the circumstantial evidence seems overwhelming.