Social dynamics of toxic metal industry in medieval Europe

So wild and sad, reading the article and discussing the subject with a “knowledgeable entity”. (It’s great having smart “friends” that don’t mind when you pester them with rabbit hole questions at 3am.)

The “Erin Brockovitch” (hexavalent chromium groundwater poisoning) story in Hinkley CA describes harm that went on for a couple decades. The underground plume spread about 8 miles, affecting a couple thousand people.

The Peak District case was a whole mining region exposed through dust and fumes for maybe _850 years_, with the airborne lead spreading so far it showed up in Alpine ice and Scandinavian lakes.

Dust brought in to homes by workers, and fumes over the whole town and countryside, bringing sickness, early death, craziness and lower intelligence to men, women and children. And nobody could figure it out.

I grew up in Hope, near Castleton, and worked for several years as a tour guide at Speedwell Cavern which is a failed lead mine from the 1700's. This was a fascinating read as I knew lots of the later history, but as the article points out, the earlier history is much less well known.

I wonder what the community vibe would have been like, in these places where lead smelting was so prevalent.

We all (now) know the effects of severe lead poisoning. Delirium and hallucinations, miscarriage and still births, anemia .. what would these forboding circumstances have been attributed to at the time?

Did people understand how hazardous the production of lead was?

I have met and seen multiple individuals handling and strapping exposed lead to pickleball paddles in recent years. It is maddening.

Without education younger people reasonably have little understanding .

People born in the 60s and maybe 70s have the leaded gasoline termination and leaded paint public awareness efforts to inform them. I don’t think people born in the late 90s or early 2000s have been exposed to the news of the risks of lead so much.

I like to fantasize about a TV show where I go to the past and tell famous people about their impact to film their reactions. Not sure if this would be on the list. "We dug up your teeth to measure the lead content and determined you were poor."