Arsenic And Bradford Sweets
William Hardaker sold sweets at the Green Market in Bradford. The sweets were peppermint “humbugs,” usually made using peppermint oil, sugar, and gum. However, to cut costs, people who made sweets at that time would instead use “daft” instead of sugar.
Daft could mean almost anything, plaster of Paris, limestone, and all manner of flavorful replacements. There was a mixup for one batch of tablets at the druggist one day, and he was accidentally sold 12 pounds of what was actually arsenic trioxide.
When making the candy, he thought the finished product looked odd and soon became ill himself from eating the arsenic tablets, but not before selling enough of them to make 200 people suffer from food poisoning and kill 20 of them.
Authorities eventually traced the line of the sick back to Humbug Billy and his sweet stand. After testing, the tablets were found to have between 0.7 and 1 gram of arsenic (a half a gram is lethal). The event contributed to the passage of the Pharmacy Act 1868 in the United Kingdom and legislation regulating the adulteration of foodstuffs.
