The Romans knew that lead is harmful, yet we used it in paint, pipes and other places until very recently. Are there other materials the ancients knew were harmful that we still use today?
Posted Mar 25, 2014, 3:10 PM UTC
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Posted Mar 25, 2014, 3:10 PM UTC
The definition of "harmful" is incredibly broad here. I think the old idion "The poison is in the dose" leaps to mind. After all, ancient civilisations knew that water could drown you, fire could burn you, and steel could poke a hole in you. We still use all of those things.
So, that gets us to the issue of how harmful the Romans considered lead, if we are going to use that as a harmfulness benchmark. After a quick look, it seems that Vitruvius was one of the first to really talk about the dangers of lead pipes in the 1st century BC. (There is a quote here http://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/wine/leadpoisoning.html )
He talks about observed illness in lead workers, but as far as I can tell, his writing doesn't actually cite illness in the general population due to lead. Obviously, population statistics and modern epidemiology weren't really available to him, so he really had more of a well informed hunch about how dangerous the lead pipes were, rather than a full understanding. The real observed danger was in making the pipes. Inhalation of lead fumes has a very obvious and immediate effect on a plumber, so it would have been quite reasonable to conclude that the only major danger of lead was in working with the molten form making pipes. Virtruvius obviously figured out that wasn't true, but he's notions obviously weren't universal. Besides, when you get right down to it, clean drinking water that somebody says might be unwholesome in the long term in some vague, abstract sense, is always going to seem better than a slowish death of thirst. So, the safety focus for centuries would have been on "don't stick your face in the boiling lead, or you'll go a bit stupid."
So, by that benchmark, what are the things that we use today that at some point in history, somebody had a hunch might be harmful? Pretty much everything.
Did they know? When did they know? One sees quotes like: "A lead derivative is included in roughly 90 of the 450 recipes included in the Apicius, a late 4th century Roman cook book." (from: http://io9.com/5877587/the-first-artificial-sweetener-poisoned-lots-of-romans) which suggest widespread ignorance of any toxicity. However this reasonably convincing essay http://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/wine/leadpoisoning.html suggests that the Romans did ingest lots of lead while stating: "Certainly, the Romans knew lead to be dangerous, even if they did not associate it with their lead cooking vessels". As to OP's question: I don't know but imagine mercury and arsenic would fill the bill
Compare it to a modern example. Most Americans know that fast food is unhealthy and can lead to disease, even though they probably wouldn't be able to give you a correct answer as to why. And yet we eat it.
So there's a possibility that they knew and simply didn't care. Humans are very bad at gauging risk, generally.