Deadly Adulteration and Slow Poisoning Unmasked. Anonymous

The able and patriotic Editor of the Literary Gazette, No. 156, in the course of his review of Mr. Accum’s meritorious work on Culinary Poisons, makes the following just and striking remarks:

One has laughed at the whimsical description of the cheats in Humphrey Clinker, but it is too serious for a joke to see that, in almost every thing which we eat or drink, we are condemned to swallow swindling, if not poison—that all the items of metropolitan, and many of country, consumption are deteriorated, deprived of nutritious properties, or rendered obnoxious to humanity, by the vile arts and merciless sophistications of their sellers. So general seems the corruption, and so fatal the tendency, of most of the corrupting materials, that we can no longer wonder at the prevalence of painful disorders and the briefness of existence (on an average) in spite of the great increase of medical knowledge, and the amazing improvement in the healing science, which distinguish our era. No skill can prevent the effects of daily poisoning; and no man can prolong his life beyond a short standard, where every meal ought to have its counteracting medicine.

Devoted to disease by baker, brewer, grocer, wine-merchant, spirit-dealer, cheesemonger, pastry-cook, confectioner, &c. the physician is called to our assistance; but here again the pernicious system of fraud, as it has given the blow, steps in to defeat the remedy: even the physician’s prescription is adulterated!

Mr. Accum’s account of water (i. e. the Companies’ water—the filthy and unwholesome water supplied from the Thames, of which the delicate citizens of Westminster fill their tanks and stomachs, at the very spot where one hundred thousand cloacinæ, containing every species of filth, and all unutterable things, and strongly impregnated with gas, the refuse and drainings of hospitals, slaughter houses, colour, lead, and soap works, drug-mills, manufactories, and dung-hills, daily disgorge their abominable contents) is so fearful, that we see there is no wisdom in the well: and if we then fly to wine, we find, from his analysis, that there is no truth in that liquid; bread turns out to be a crutch to help us onward to the grave, instead of being the staff of life; in porter there is no support, in cordials no consolation; in almost every thing poison, and in scarcely any medicine, cure!

That this denunciation of fraud and villany is not mere assertion, the terrific disclosures that I am about to make (some of which are to be found in Mr. Accum’s book, and in greater detail than the space I have prescribed myself allows) will fully prove to the contrary, and show that it is the duty of the government to protect the public by some legislative provisions, and to prohibit and render penal the nefarious practices in daily use for the diabolical and deleterious adulteration of the necessaries of life, practices which are destructively inimical to the public health and welfare. As Mr. Accum has pointedly said in the preface to his work, “as the eager and insatiable thirst for gain is proof against prohibitions and penalties, and the possible sacrifice of a fellow creature’s life is a secondary consideration among unprincipled dealers,” nothing short of subjecting the offence to the operation of the criminal law seems likely to suppress the wicked and diabolical practices, and secure the public from the silent and unobserved effects of being slowly poisoned: transportation ought to be the mildest punishment of the iniquitous offender. Is it not, as the same gentleman justly observes, a reflection on English law, that “a man who robs a fellow subject of a few shillings on the highway should be sentenced to death, while he who distributes a slow poison to a whole community should escape unpunished,” at most with only the infliction of a trifling fine, which proves to him the inefficiency of the law to restrain him from a continuance in his iniquitous practices? The inefficacy of fines, however large, in deterring offenders from a commission or repetition of the crime is evident, from the inadequacy of the large penalties to which the adultering brewer, grocer, coffee-manufacturer, &c. are subject when detected. For, besides the difficulty of detecting this species of fraud and iniquity, the large profits, which are often several hundreds per cent. enable the culprits to meet the trivial loss which attends a detection, and speedily reimburses them the penalty of a conviction.

“Plures crapula quam gladius,” says the old adage, which,

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