Quacks Pretend To Cure Other Men’s Disorders But Rarely Find A Cure For Their Own – Part Sixty Six

Dr MacKenzie’s Arsenical Toilet Soap

The juice of cucumbers has long been used for the treatment of skin conditions such as sunburn and freckles, a fact noted by Nicholas Culpeper in his Complete Herbal of 1653. During the late 19^th century a fanciful theory did the rounds that what made the cucumber so beneficial for the complexion was the presence of a natural arsenic, as the San Francisco Call made clear in its 14^th August 1898 edition; “the natural arsenic in the cucumber makes a splendid bleach, and the beauty of it that is that it is perfectly harmless.” The New York Times repeated the canard in September 1909 by commenting, “There is a sort of natural arsenic in the cucumber that makes it valuable as a skin whitener.”

These days we would blanche – perhaps a more effective form of skin lightener – at the thought of using what is a toxic substance in a beauty product but there was a demand for arsenic soaps, which practitioners of the art of quackery were only too willing to meet. One early such manufacturer, a Mr H W Bolton of Bristow and Co in Clerkenwell, London, was hauled up in front of the magistrate not because there was arsenic in his toiletry but because there wasn’t enough of it.

The man was revealingly honest during his cross-examination, as the Times reported on 7^th December 1863; “It was made to be sold as a toilet soap, not as a medicinal preparation. Two-and-a-half grains of arsenic were put into every 3 cwt of soap. He did not pretend that this small quantity of arsenic made any difference to the soap. Then why put it in at all? Because it is arsenical soap. But why sell it as arsenical soap? Because there is a demand for it. People think arsenic is good for the complexion, so we make arsenical soap for them.”

The most popular version of arsenical toilet soap in the UK was Dr MacKenzie’s version which sold at one shilling a tablet or for sixpence you could have an unscented soap. The adverts advised that it was “made from the Purest Ingredients, and Absolutely Harmless.” Inevitably, the prospective client was advised to beware of imitations – “Have Dr MacKenzie’s or none.” The soap was also advertised by way of a note which went “Dear Cora, have you noticed how much George’s complexion has improved lately? He has been using Dr MacKenzie’s arsenical toilet soap. Have you tried it? It is simply delicious. Yours with fondest love, Martha.”

The soap was extremely popular and when the manufacturing company floated its shares in 1897, the prospectus accompanying the offer claimed sales of around 340,000 bars a year. Rather like Mr Bolton’s soap, the amount of arsenic in it was negligible, if there was any at all, leaving it somewhat short “of the nature, substance and quality” required by the consumers.

Mercifully, it was not as dangerous as some of its American equivalents, the leading brand of which was Dr Campbell’s Safe Arsenic Wafers. The said doc allegedly used it to cure his own sallow complexion until a bout of yellow fever intervened, leaving his skin, according to the New York Times “a far deeper yellow than Oscar Wilde’s favourite sunflower.” At least his fate was not as bad as a poor girl, who, according to the Indianapolis Sentinel in 1880, “had gradually lost her sight as a result of taking arsenic” and her heartless fiancé decided to wait to see whether her sight came back before pledging his troth.

Worse still was the fate of Hildegarde Walton of St Louis who died in 1911 after having used several boxes of the wafers to cure a skin problem.

Arsenic soaps disappeared in the 1920s and that was probably no bad thing.

Coffin Of The Week

Death is a booming business – according to the World Health Organisation 100 of us die every minute – and funerals are becoming increasingly more expensive and come at a cost to the environment

With that in mind, I was intrigued by a funeral exhibition held in a church in Amsterdam, not least because its theme was that it was time that we thought outside of the box.

The latest trend, it seems, is for eco-friendly, flat-packed coffins. Two celebrants from the Hastings area, the aptly named Kate Dyer and Kate Tym, have already run successful coffin clubs where members can meet to make and decorate their own final resting places. If nothing else, it provides the elderly with company and a focus for what remains of their life.

The problem, though, is what to do with the thing once it is built and you are not quite ready to get into it. William Warren from Shelves for Life has the answer. His rather sleek and elegant storage system can be converted into a coffin, providing the ultimate storage space for the here and now and the after-life.

The problem with it, though, is that it still needs to be converted into a coffin when it is needed, probably the last thing your grieving relatives will want to do.

My preference would be to make the coffin ahead of time and use it as a wardrobe in the hallway for hanging hats and coats. It would make a tremendous conversation piece as guests entered the hallowed portals of Blogger Towers and would serve as a timely reminder of our mortality.

Food for thought, indeed.

Sporting Event Of The Week (12)

Around 40 competitors rocked up to Dunbar on Scotland’s east coast last weekend to take part in the second European Stone Stacking Championships. The venue, Lauderdale Park and Eye Cave Beach, was chosen because the many shapes, sizes and colours of the rocks in the area make it a paradise for stone stackers – at least that is what the organisers say.

I hadn’t realised it but the benefit of stacking stones, at least of you believe the publicity for the event, is that you get moments of clarity as you search for the next stone or find the sweet spot of gravity when you know you’ve got perfect balance. I suppose there are also periods of intense frustration as, jenga like, your piles come crashing down.

Be that as it may, there were a number of competitions spread over the weekend, including most stones balanced one on top of the other, a children’s competition, balancing against the clock – a timed competition rather than stacking stones against a timepiece which would have been rather easy – and the most artistic balance. The photos of some of the pieces are spectacular and oddly fascinating.

The overall winner was Pedro Duran from Spain whose prize included financial assistance to participate in the World Championships in Llano in Texas next year. Mind you, he only balanced 29 stones on top of each other, three fewer than last year’s winner.

Standards must be slipping.

What Is The Origin Of (177)?…

Six Ways to Sunday

I read from time to time documents in American-English and occasionally I I come across a phrase which pulls me up short. One such is six ways to Sunday which from the context I deduced meant comprehensively, completely or thoroughly. However I looked at it, it seemed an odd phrase.

Although its usage is now almost exclusively American, its origin seems to be British and related to eyes that appeared to look in different directions. The poet, George Wither, described a maiden in his Satire of the Passion of Love in 1622 thus; “Oh those fair star-like eyes of thine! One says,/ When to my thinking, she hath look’d nine ways.” Everyone’s perspective is different, I suppose. Francis Grose defined Squint-a-pipes in his Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue of 1785 as “a squinting man or woman…looking both ways for Sunday…looking nine ways at once.” A classic description of the condition of strabismus. The phrase crossed the pond, appearing in James Kirke Paulding’s short story, Cobus Yerks, published in 1828; “over a pair of rascally little cross-firing twinkling eyes, that, as the country people said, looked at least nine ways from Sunday.”

These seems to have spawned a wide variety of variants, the common denominators being ways and a day of the week – take eight ways from Tuesday as an example – with the moving parts being a number and a preposition. From all these variants six and Sunday seem to have taken root fairly quickly in America, the only variable being the preposition. Its usage was initially in relation to sight – “he was always looking about six ways for Sunday, when he’s walking” from Morning Visits in The American Monthly Magazine for 1824 – and in Godey’s Magazine of 1864 “a luminous representation of that extraordinary physiognomical phenomenon known as looking six ways for Sunday.”

Its usage broadened out to indicate a generally dishevelled appearance – “and through the aperture red hairs in abundance stood six ways for Sunday”, An Original Character from the Family Magazine of 1840 – and then more generally to suggest an eccentric fashion – “a kind of strange black wheel – all hubs and spokes, and no tires – revolving six ways for Sunday.” In the British journal, Notes and Queries, a correspondent noted that looking nine ways for Sunday and looking two ways for Sunday were expressions that meant at a loss or nonplussed, perhaps because a squint gave the impression of being bemused.

Later examples substituted from for for. Lynn Roby Meekins in the Saturday Evening Post of 8^th April 1899 wrote, “When she did that, he said, she knocked me six ways from Sunday.” The sense is that it was a knockout blow, a similar sense being implied in its use in the 18^th volume of The American Flint of 1926; “the glass manufacturers have it all over this man Ford six ways from Sunday.”

Six ways to Sunday seems to be a much later version, the first example I can trace dating to 1937 and appearing in The Dairy; “there are, no doubt, many dairymen who know the food retailing business backwards and forwards and six ways to Sunday.”  In other words, thoroughly, the sense it retains today. Myra Page’s use of it in With Sun in our Blood from 1950 – “and stretch it six ways to Sunday” – indicates that it had the sense of taking it to its limit.

Sunday probably gained precedence because it is the most important day of the week and six added an attractive element of alliteration to the phrase. That there are six other days of the week is probably just a coincidence.

I think I have exhausted this subject six ways to Sunday!

Some People Are So Poor All They Have Is Money – Part Five

Burning down the house

Stories are legion of wedding celebrations that got out of hand. During the celebrations of the nuptials of Princess Jayalakshmi Ammani in 1897, a fire broke out and destroyed the wooden palace in Mysore. Palaces on the site had a rather chequered history – the first was destroyed by lightning in 1638, the second was demolished by Tipu Sultan – him again – in 1793 and the third was completed in 1803. The current palace, completed in 1912 and designed by the British architect, Lord Henry Irwin, is the fourth to have stood on the site.

It is a truly remarkable structure, consisting of three storeys made of finest granite, pink marble complete with a five-storey tower which is 145 feet tall. Architecturally it is a melange of Indian, Indo-Islamic, neo-classical and Gothic styles, known as Indo-Sarcenic. The interiors are stunning with embellished, finely chiselled doors and beautifully incised mahogany ceilings. It is quite easy to see why the Maharaja ran out of money and had to sell his jewels.

Facing the Chamundi Hills it is intended to be a symbol of the Maharaja’s devotion to the goddess Chamundi. The splendour of the palace is enhanced by a large, beautiful and, for India, an unusually well-maintained garden. There are three gates to the palace, the south gate reserved for the use of the hoi polloi. Even the rather conservatively curated museum had spectacular costumes and artefacts that took the breath away.

How many summer palaces do you need?

Well, we visited two that belonged to Tipu Sultan. It wasn’t that he was greedy, it was more a reflection of the fact that his fortunes waxed and waned during his run-ins with the Brits and so he had to keep moving around.

The first was in Bangalore and, to be honest, not too much of it survives and what has is in a fairly run-down state. Nonetheless it was possible to get a sense of what it would have been like, with beautiful floral motifs just about visible on the walls and ceilings. The palace is made of teak and is a profusion of pillars, arches and balconies. There is a museum showing some exhibits relating to Tipu, including his crown and sketches of his throne which was coated with gold sheets and bejewelled with emeralds. Tipu vowed never to sit on it until the British had been driven out of the country. The Brits melted it down and sold it off!

Tipu’s military headquarters were situated on an island in the river Kaveri, about ten miles from Mysore, called Srirangapatna. It is here that one can see the impressive remains of his second summer palace, Dariya Daulat palace, which is approached through an impressive gateway and a beautiful, still well maintained garden known as Daria Daulat Bagh.

The palace, constructed in 1784, is built mainly out of teak wood in an Indo-Sarcenic style, rectangular in shape and raised on a platform. Along the exterior of the building are wooden pillars marking off corridors and inside the staircases leading up to the upper floor are hidden. All the available space on the walls and ceilings are sumptuously decorated with colourful frescoes, some of which represent the victory of Tipu and Hyder Ali over the Brits at Pollilur in 1780. To even things up, on display is Sir Robert Ker Porter’s dramatic painting, Storming of Srirangapattanam. Both show the brutality of the conflict and seem quite out of keeping with the peacefulness and the architectural grace of the building.

You can’t have one without the other, I guess.