A Respectable Occupation: - University of Hertfordshire Research ...

was of a much lower class than Smith and a totally unsuitable marriage
prospect; the alleged murder was committed to prevent her parents
discovering the relationship. 186
In addition to criminal usage, there continued to be many examples of
accidental poisoning and suicide. For example the famous case in 1858 in
Bradford, when 200 people were poisoned, of whom 20 died. They had eaten
peppermints from a batch that had been accidentally adulterated with
arsenic that had been mistaken for calcium sulphate, a material often used
as a filler. 187 Or when 340 children, at an industrial school in Norwood in
1857, were poisoned by milk they were drinking. The milk had been diluted
with water taken from a boiler that had been descaled the previous day
using arsenic. 188 The Pharmaceutical Society, believing that the problem
lay with the lack of education and training of those who were permitted to
sell arsenic, refused to support any further poisons legislation unless it
included a change to the Pharmacy Act. 189
It had been accepted all along that the Arsenic Act only applied to the
control of arsenic and there were plenty of other poisonous substances
readily available: Robert Vaughan died from an overdose of Laudanum
which he had been using as a pain killer, George Lewis committed suicide
using potassium cyanide and James Moore killed himself using Oxalic Acid.
These three cases are all routine reports of poisonings from the same issue
186
F. Tennyson Jesse, „Madeleine Smith 1857‟ in H. Hodge and J. Hodge, (eds.) selected and introduced
by J. Mortimer, Famous Trials (London, 1984), p. 133.
187
I. Jones, „Arsenic and the Bradford Poisonings of 1858‟, Pharmaceutical Journal, 265, 7128, (2000)
938-939.
188
Bartrip, „A “Pennurth of Arsenic for Rat Poison”‟, 67.
189
„Sale of Poisons‟, Pharmaceutical Journal, (1850), ix, p. 356 quoted in Bartrip, „A “Pennurth of
Arsenic for Rat Poison”‟, 63, note 37.
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