Letheby, a renowned chemist working at the London Hospital, confirmed that the cause of death for a girl was arsenic poisoning. While people knew that eating arsenic could kill you, they didn’t realize that merely being near it could cause people to get sick and die. The water supplies were untainted, and the houses were clean, but there remained one common factor: the green wallpaper. Many families around this time grew mysteriously ill for no apparent reason.
In fact, it is possible that the people using the arsenic-laden wall coverings did not realize how deadly it was. CC BY-SA 3.0 An Invisible KillerĪlthough the dangers associated with ingesting arsenic were well known, the people of the 19 th century did not care when it came to the arsenic found covering their walls. Not all commercially available green paints contained arsenic, but many of the prominent ones did, such as Emerald Green, Paris Green, and Schweinfurt Green.Ĭan of deadly Paris Green pigment. As its name would suggest, copper arsenite contains the deadly element arsenic. This color was particularly popular among artists and home designers in the Pre-Raphaelite movement.
In 1778, a Swedish Chemist named Carl Scheele created a brilliant green colored pigment called “Scheele’s Green,” which was composed of copper arsenite. Wallpaper isn’t as popular as it once was, and perhaps the reason for this falling out of fashion was its ability to kill!
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