When Looks Kill: Mad Hatters and Other Deadly Trends in Fashion and Beauty
A woman loses the ability to move her arms, A man bursts into flames from seemingly nowhere, and one of the most notorious assassinations in history. What they all have in common may surprise you.
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Heart Starts Pounding is written and produced by Kaelyn Moore.
SOURCES
https://digital.lib.ecu.edu/20691
How Catherine de Medici Made Gloves Laced with Poison Fashionable - Atlas Obscura
Dangerous beauty: hazardous chemicals and poisons in historic cosmetics - Science Museum Group
Digital Collections - National Library of Medicine (nih.gov)
18 Dec 1910, Page 1 - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette at Newspapers.com
https://archive.org/details/abrahamlincoln1910john/page/48/mode/2up
Fashion Victims: The Dangers of Dress Past and Present, Alison Matthews David, Bloomsbury
TRANSCRIPT
On September 27th, 1868, Dr. Lewis Sayre made a house call to a 19 year old girl who had been complaining of not feeling well for a while. Her name has been redacted in the case file, but we will refer to her as Alice.
Alice thought she may be suffering from a spinal disease. She had been feeling a general malaise for a few years, but recently, her arms had gotten incredibly stiff. When Dr. Sayre first arrived at her home, he was confused by her condition.
Alice greeted the doctor at the door with her arms hung by her side and her hands frozen at 90 degree angles. She had lost the ability to extend her wrists beyond that, and her fingers seemed to be frozen in place as well. It wasn’t that she had lost the ability to move her wrists and hands, but almost like they had taken on a life of their own.
Upon closer inspection, Dr. Sayre could see that the muscles in Alice’s hands and forearms had atrophied significantly. The bones in her hands were almost as defined as if there were no skin on them at all. He described is as if there was a tight skin glove over her bones.
Because of this, Alice had stopped being able to do really anything that required her hands. She could no longer brush her hair or even feed herself . Dr. Sayre had asked how long she had been living like this, to which she responded that her hands started giving her trouble a few months ago. First it was stiffness and cramps. but recently she stopped being able to use them at all. Now she couldn’t even get her fingers to bend.
Over the summer, she told him, she had a fever, after which she rode a horse and had trouble holding the reins. Another doctor had told her it was a spinal issue and gave her a spinal supporter, telling her that she should be back to normal in a couple of weeks.
Dr. Sayre asked her to move around and do her daily tasks. And as he watched her around the house, he could tell that her arms were not the only problem Alice was having. She had no energy, possibly from not being able to eat easily, but even walking from room to room left her breathless and tired.
So It was hard for him to believe it was a problem with her spine like she was saying. He took off a spinal supporter she had been given by another doctor to assess the spine.
No swelling. If it really was an issue with her spine he thought surely there would be some swelling. He pressed his fingers into the bony divots in her back. No pain, no heat, nothing.
In his mind, he starts going through the large rolodex of medical issues that could be causing this. Was it carnomania, a paralysis of will power? No, that usually happened to his bed ridden patients.
But then, Dr. Sayre gets hit with an idea. His eyes light up, he thinks he has something.
Show me your gums. He says.
My gums? Alice asks. But she doesn’t have the strength to question him, so she bears her teeth
And that’s where he sees it, the thing he was looking for. Right around the edges of Alice’s teeth, riiiight where the tooth became gum, was all dark blue.
If you’re wondering what that meant, so was Alice. But Dr. Sayre didn’t have time to answer her questions. He jumped to his feet and ran to the kitchen, sticking his head under the sink.
What are you doing? Alice called out from the other room, too exhausted to run with him into the kitchen.
“No, it’s not the pipes” Dr. Sayre huffed
“What do you mean it’s not the pipes” alice questioned.
He stormed back into the living room and sat down real close to alice. With a very serious look on his face he told her
“I need you to be honest with me, Alice. Have you been using anything that contains lead.”
Alice looked at him, confused. Lead? What would she use that had lead in it? But then, her eyes went wide. “My brightening cream.”
Up in Alice’s bedroom was a jar of the lead based cream called Laird’s Bloom of Youth. The cream promised to “obliterate the imperfections” of things like, discoloration of the skin, tanning, or even, god forbid Freckles. Each bottle ran for about .75 a piece and according to the New York Board of Health, was “free from any material injurious to the health or skin”
That was a lie, for some time now people had known that lead caused issues in humans, and as Alice applied the lead based cream, it was being absorbed through her skin into her bloodstream, where it was accumulating in her bones and soft tissues. Ultimately, it was responsible for paralyizing the hands that scooped it out.
It didn’t help that she had been applying this cream multiple times a day for 2 and a half years.
Luckily, Dr. Sayre caught it in time. He had seen this kind of poisoning with other women as well, many of whom used the same skin lightening cream as Alice. The cure for her was simple. Throw away the cream and never touch another skin brightener as long as you live. Within a few months, Alice’s symptoms started drastically improving.
When we look at the history of what we’ve done to maintain beauty standards, Alice is hardly an exception. So today, I want to look at some of the deadly ways we’ve tried to look good, both in beauty and in fashion. And as always, listener discretion is advised.
Welcome to Heart Starts Pounding, a podcast of horrors, hauntings and Mysteries. I’m your host, Kaelyn Moore.
If you’re listening to the ad supported version of the show, thank you so much. Our sponsors make this show possible! And if you’re listening through patreon, you’ll have access to ad free listening on top of other perks, like bonus episodes. This month, I did an extra episode about a poisoning case in Australia that I couldn’t stop reading about. Basically, four family members go over to this woman’s house for lunch, and within days, three of them are dead. I’ve probably been thinking about it so much because it was just thanksgiving. Head over to patreon to get the full story.
I also want to welcome everyone who may be here after hearing the episode I did with Payton from Murder with My Husband. I am soooo happy you’re here. Believe it or not, that episode was the first time I had ever met payton in person, and I felt like we could have spent the whole day chatting about cases.
If you can’t tell This is a community for the darkly curious, and I have a feeling a lot of you are going to relate to this episode. Maybe you’ve indulged in a few morbid endeavors in order to maintain your beauty. Perhaps you’ve injected the deadly bacteria Clostridium Botulinum into your frown lines to smooth out your wrinkles, or you’ve exposed your fingers to cancerous UV lights to get the perfect manicure.
Or, if you're like me, you subjected yourself to essentially a trap straight out of a saw movie in order to get a tooth fixed. The other day I had 3 different people sticking their hands in my mouth as I was numbed up to my eyeballs, all so I could make my smile look beautiful again. If your wondering, I chipped a tooth when I fell off my bike when I was 8 and have to get it repaired every now and then. They say beauty is pain, but should it be this morbid?
That got my brain turning. What else have we done to look beautiful that’s maybe worked against us. And wow, I could do 10 episodes about this, but I found three stories I think will tickle your dark curiosity. We have stories of exploding hair brushes, poisoned gloves, and people going mad while making hats. All of this, after a short break.
On the evening of December 17th, 1910, Stockton Snyder, an 82 year old man from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, sat by the fire combing his beard. Upstairs, his daughter in law, Mrs. Wilson, was getting ready for bed when all of a sudden, she heard screams coming from the first floor where Stockton was.
Thinking he had perhaps fallen and couldn’t get up, she ran downstairs to assist him, but what she saw was much more horrific than what she expected.
Stockton’s beard was enveloped in flames which were quickly spreading to his clothing. Mrs. Wilson grabbed a comforter and started smothering the fire. And though she was able to put it out, it was too late. Stockton lay on the floor, his face and upper body badly burned.
What happened? Mrs. Wilson shouted at Stockton, who was slowly slipping unconscious due to the severity of the burns.
The only word he could muster, the last word Stockton ever said before he succumbed to the burns was “Comb”
It turned out, Stockton was using a celluloid comb to untangle his beard. As he brushed, hairs from his long, gray beard got entangled in the teeth of the comb, which he would then hold over the fire to burn off.
But Celluloid was incredibly flammable. It had to get particularly hot to catch fire, about 150 c or 300 F, which it would have gotten to in the fire. The other thing about celluloid, though, is that when it does catch fire, it can quickly get up to 815 C, or 1500 F, and can release toxic gasses that explode on contact with the air.
Stockton’s comb had exploded on him, sending shards of flaming celluloid back into his beard.
So let’s say we cut the manufacturers of the combs the benefit of the doubt. They were making an explosive beauty product. But plastics were relatively new at the time. A response to environmentalists rioting against ivory and tortoise shells being used to make combs. To do that, turtles would be captured and then boiled in hot water or oil so that totoiseshell could be taken from it’s underbelly. I mean, how could you not prefer celluloid be used instead.
But people had been aware of the risk that celluloid posed to consumers. Because just a year earlier the Morrison Factory, a factory that shaped these types of combs, had a devastating explosion.
On November 8th, 1909, at around 9:00 in the morning, a man was working on the elevator in the Morrison Factory, when his cigarette slipped out of his mouth.
And there it fell, down the service elevator shaft, past the floors of employees busy shaping the fibroid and celluloid into comb shapes, down to the basement, where the companies raw, unmolded celluloid lay.
After a few moments, employees described what sounded like a giant WOO sound, and the floors all lurched upwards, as if the building were taking a giant breath. And within seconds, white flames started flickering up from the basement.
Everyone got up quickly and started running towards any exit they could find, but the fire was coming from below. So the only two options were up, or out, there was no going down to the building's main entrance.
The only problem was, this was 1909. There wasn’t really a fire code buildings had to adhere to. And all of the windows had iron bars on them.
People who were passing by the building when it caught fire, recalled watching as employees desperately clawed at the bars on the windows, unable to break them open and free themselves. A coroner said that of the 9 employees that burned to death, all but one would have survived if the windows had not been barred.
The one person who would have most likely still died was William Morrison, the building owner's 24 year old son. When the fire broke out, William realized that the safe of the building was open. Meaning that all of the buildings important documents and cash on hand would be destroyed. As he, his brother and his father were running out of the building, he turned to them and told them he was going back in to close the safe, they begged him not to, but nothing would change his mind.
When the fire fighters showed up to the scene, they stood by the windows with William’s brother and father, and all watched as William staggered towards the safe, the white hot flames dancing around him. Molten chunks of celluloid dripped from the ceiling onto Williams clothes, burning him further. He slowly got to the open door of the safe, pushed it closed with what little strength he had, and then fell to the ground and was consumed by the fire.
Though celluloid combs were proven to be explosive, they continued to be sold to consumers. And these combs were never banned, celluloid was never made illegal. What happened to celluloid is a story we’ve heard many, many times throughout history. Manufactureres just found something cheaper to make combs out of. And it just so happened that material was less explosive. cellulose acetate.
We’re going to take a quick break, and when we come back, I want to talk about something you may have heard of. Mad Hatters, and how a 250 year old technique may have driven countless men mad.
In England in the 1800’s, there were calls for serious regulations to be placed on women’s beauty and fashion. And not in the tyrannical spaghetti straps must be three fingers wide kind of way (even though don’t get me wrong, there was plenty of that), but because people were catching on to how deadly some of it was. Friederich Engles wrote in his book, “the condition of the working class in england” that
“It is a curious fact that the production of precisely those articles which serve the personal adornment of the ladies of the bourgeoisie involved the saddest consequences for the health of the workers.”
It seemed Engles was upset that superfluous women’s fashion was harmful to the working class. But what Engles was ignorant to, was the fact that men’s fashion at the time was most likely killing more of the working class. So get off your high horse, Friedrerich!
I would bet a large sum of money that in his closet, Engles owned a felt hat. Because it was not only fashionable at the time to wear felt hats, it was borderline inappropriate to leave the house without one.
These hats were typically made of either beaver or rabbit, both animals that have extremely soft fur while they’re alive. However, once they were killed and skinned for hat making, their furs would become thick and coarse.
But no worries, there was a solution for that. A bright orange solution made of nitric acid and mercury. Hat makers, or hatters as they were known, would spend a good majority of their day coating the pelts in the bright orange liquid while stuck inside an unventilated room.
Mercury is poisonous to people, and we can be exposed through inhaling it, though it can absorb through our skin if we touch it and stomachs if we eat it. These hatters were mostly being exposed through breathing in the fumes, but they also spent all day touching the liquid solution.
A study done in France in 1925 shows the effect mercury was having on hatter’s nervous systems. An investigator asked different hatters to sign their names and the results are concerning to say the least. Hatters shook uncontrollably after years of mercury exposure and many of the signatures were unreadable.
And that was 1925, the first recording of chronic mercury poisoning appeared in 1757. A man named Jacques-Rene Tenon was studying the malaise that many hatters complained about. He visited one shop and was horrified at the illness of the employees. The oldest workers were barely over 50, which was rare because according to Jacque-Rene, it was amazing if a hatter lived to be older than 40 years old. They usually died before that. The employees would sweat profusely, even when not doing physical labor, and most of them coughed up viscous material all day.
They seemed thin, feeble, and drank alcohol all day in order to work up the momentum to continue doing their jobs.
It wasn’t until the 1940’s that studies started being done onthe emotional disturbances of hatters. And heads up, this section mentions suicide.
Hatter’s, overtime, would become shy and antisocial, but were also prone to intense bouts of anger. They also had a much higher rate of suicide than the general public, which is believed to be a direct result from the exposure to mercury. If you’ve ever listened to the podcast S town, you may be familiar
In 1857, a 61 year old hatter took his own life by drinking his own mercury solution at work. That, by the way is a horribly painful way to die, and the hatter writhed around for 12 and half hours before finally passing away.
Of all of the cases of of hatters losing control of their minds and bodies because of mercury, one seems to stand out the most
So in 1840, A man named Thomas Corbett immigrated to New York from England with his family. He was around 8 years old at the time, and within a few years he took a job as a hatter to help pay his family's bills. There’s not a lot of information about what Corbett was like when he started hatting, but we know that years into the job he started acting strange.
Other hatters complained that Corbett would stop working to sing to his coworkers or pray over them. He felt so moved by the lord during work hours that it was affecting his ability to get his work done, theother coworkers had to pick up his slack, which they were not a fan of. He changed his name from Thomas to Boston because he believed it’s what God wanted. He also started struggling with alcoholism which I mentioned earlier, a lot of hatter’s dealt with as the job took a toll on their body.
When Corbett was in his early 20’s, he lost both his wife and their child during childbirth, and this seemed to tip him over the edge. At first, his coworkers believed that his religious zeal was a way for him to cope with the trauma, but in 1858, it took a dark turn
While walking home one night after work, he was propositioned by two women. They offered to accompany him to his home, for a fee of course. Corbett politely declined the offer, he didn’t want to waver from his virtuous path.
When he got home, he was still feeling a certain way about the encounter. There was a part of him that was lonely, and wanted the women to come with him. So he turned to his bible for guidance, where he came to a chapter in Matthew that read ("And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out and cast it from thee....and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake"
Taking this section literally, he proceeded to castrate himself with a pair of scissors. I know, I’m sorry, ouch I know, there’s probably a few of you in pain just from the visual of that. But all of this is to say, something was not right in Corbett’s psyche.
Corbett continued to decline in health over the coming years. He joined the Union army in New York and would constantly argue with those above him. He was described as nervous and aggressive, all symptoms that have been linked to Mercury exposure. He was sentenced to be shot in 1863 for his erratic behavior and inability to take orders, but eventually he was just released from his unit.
His descent into madness seemed to culminate in 1865 when he shot and killed a man. But this wasn’t just a random stranger that Corbett killed. This murder would go down in history.
An order was sent out in his area that there was a fugitive on the run, but that this fugitive had to be captured alive. He was under no cricumstance to be killed. See, this fugitive had just shot and killed President lincoln. It was John Wilkes Booth.
Corbett had joined another military unit at that point, and he and the other men cornered Booth in a barn and lit it on fire to get him out. When the flames got too hot and Booth emerged, Corbett wasted no time reaching for his gun and shooting Booth.
The bullet struck him in the back of the neck, paralyzing him, but not killing him. Booth lay on the ground, his body completely frozen, begging for water but unable to drink, for two hours before he died.
History has looked at Corbett as a classic case of Mercury poisoning from his time as a hatter, but the truth is, we’ll never really know. It wasn’t until the 1940’s that studies started being done on the emotional disturbances associated with mercury exposure. Corbett could have been suffering from other serious mental disturbances that were exacerbated by the mercury. Which, would not be great, because after he murdered Booth, he went back into hat making. He eventually escaped from an insane asylum and was never heard from again.
By the 1940’s when these studies were being done, mercury was starting to be banned. But it can be argued that the real reason mercury was finally banned in Hatmaking, after 200 years of knowing it’s toxic effects, was felt hats just started going out of style. There was just less demand for them
Though the felt hats went away, the mercury did not. It’s stubborn, it sticks around in the places and products it was used in. In Danbury CT where a lot of these felt hats were made, the soil is still 7x as mercurial as it was pre industrial times. Shout out to my home state for continually shocking me with how dark its history is. If you were to find one of these hats today, perhaps at an antique store, the hat would still be full of toxic mercury. Happy thrifting!
Ok, so we’ve talked about some deadly beauty trends that did not intentionally kill people, but did not try to do anything to make sure people did not die. We’re going to take a quick break, and when we come back, I want to talk about a time that someone may have used fashion to intentionally kill someone. The case of the perfumed gloves, after the break.
For our last story, Let’s take a trip back to France in the 16th century. Italy’s Catherine De Medici became a French queen when she married King Henry II. and together, they had their sights set on Navarre, a small kingdom next to france, in between what is today France and Spain. Catherine and Henry wanted to find a way to unite the two kingdoms.
Navarre was ruled by Queen Jeanne D’Albret, and as luck would have it, Catherine had a daughter and Jeanne had a son. Henry and Catherine decided that the two should strategically marry as a way to bring the two kingdoms together.
Only, Jeanne knew what Catherine was really up to. Jeanne had just declared Navarre a protestant kingdom, and Catherine, famously catholic, was trying to re convert Navarre to Catholicism
So Jeanne vehemently opposed the marriage of her son to Catherine’s daughter. Obviously because she didn’t want to have her kingdom overtaken by the Catholics, but also because she thought Catherine was well, horribly mean and unlikeable. She had spoken to catherine a few times about the marriage and each time Catherine would lie about things Jeanne said to make her look bad, and openly Mocked her. Reading Jeannes letters to her son are like reading a high school girls diary. She complains incessantly about how much of a brat Catherine was.
Word of the feuding queens spread throughout the kingdom. They didn’t have tabloids back then, but rumor mill carried this feud far and wide
And then, two months before the wedding. Jeanne died suddenly. And in the court of public opinion,Catherine must have had something to do with it.
But Catherine lived hundreds of miles away, how could that have happened.
Well, Catherine was Italian, and one thing she brought with her to France was the idea of perfuming. Remember, this is the middle ages, everything smelled terrible back then, and that’s not really an exaggeration. There was no plumbing, horse manure was everywhere, and you were lucky if you could bury your dead deep enough they wouldn't wash back up to the surface during a rainstorm.
A very fashionable, high status symbol at the time was leather gloves. And though they were for the elites and royals, they were not safe from medieval smells. Leather, at the time, was finished with animal excrement. This gave the gloves a smooth finish, but also the pervasive scent of….poop.
the Italians had an answer to this. They were obsessed with perfuming things, adding pleasant scents to their clothes, their bodies, and their gloves. Though, I can’t imagine how much this helped because animal poop covered in fabreeze has to still smell terrible…. But it was what they had at the time.
Catherine brought this method to france, and as a welcome to the family gift to Jeanne, she sent her a pair of these scented gloves. Only, they were laced with more than just perfume, they were laced with poison. Once Jeanne put on the gloves, her health deteriorated rapidly over the following days.
Of course, historians debate this, and sure there’s no way to ever be sure. But again, the gossipy subjects had made up their mind, they believed Catherine poisoned Jeanne, and her reputation never recovered. Catherine had been doing other things that made her french subjects wary of her, like giving Nostradamus an important place in the royal court. The supposed poisoning mixed with her love of astrology convinced the kingdom that she was a witch.
I’m curious, what fashion and beauty trends do we follow today that will be deemed dangerous to our health in the future. Feel free to write it under the instagram post I do for this episode, @ heart starts pounding, or shoot me a message.
Also, I know this sounds like a terrible idea, but dont you kind of want to touch a mercury felt hat now? All of the descriptions i read about these hats talked about how soft they were, and I keep having the intrusive thought that I need to feel one. If you have what you believe is a mercury cured felt hat as like a family heirloom, don’t touch it, dont even go near it. But if you have touched in the past and you want to shoot me an email about what it felt like, you have the free will to do so. And I’ll just leave it at that.
Hi, it’s kaelyn again, ok so I have one last thing for this episode. I was going to put it after the credits, but I don’t think most people stay until the end end. If you caught the phone call i put with leo once after the credits than congrats, you’re one of probably 4 people that heard that.
But I wanted to include an interesting history tid bit. You know when someone starts talking about mad hatters, there’s always someone that jumps in with the fact that the phrase “mad as a hatter” comes from mercury poisoning. I don’t know why, but I would always get annoyed when people would bring this up. Same with whenever anyone jumps in with, it’s actually not drinking the cool-aid, it was flavor aid they were drinking. Like, at this point, we know.
But, if you too, for no reason, get annoyed when people bring up the mad hatter fact, well do I have the rebuttal fact for you. Historians are not 100% on the phrase Mad as a hatter coming from hatters suffering from mercury poisoning. And the mad hatter from Alice in Wonderland? He’s just a hatter, his character is not called the mad hatter. He has a mad tea party, but Lewis Caroll doesn’t refer to him as the mad hatter.
There was a phrase, popular in england in the middle ages, that was “mad as an Adder” which is a type of venomous snake. Some historians believe that mad as a hatter, is just a mistranslation of mad as an adder. And then, when hatters actually started going mad, the phrase took off. Anyways, Just wanted to give you some pub trivia to keep in your back pocket!
This has been heart starts pounding, written and produced by me, Kaelyn Moore. Sound design and Mix by Peachtree Sound. Thank you so much to all of our new patrons, you will be thanked by name in the monthly newsletter.
Special thanks to Travis Dunlap, Greyson Jernigan, the team at WME and Ben Jaffe. And thank you to Audioboom. Have a heart pounding story or a case request? Check out Heart Starts Pounding.com. Until next time, stay curious.