The Franklin Expedition of 1845 comes to mind. There were even theories about new-ish technology (tinned food) accidentally poisoning the crew with lead.
TL;DR: Mercury Chloride was sold as a powerful laxative referred to as "thunder clappers" which enabled the Lewis and Clark expedition could manage on a meat-heavy diet and the occasional syphilis. Last paragraph sums it up nicely:
So as Lewis and Clark’s men made their way across the continent and across Oregon, they were unknowingly depositing a trail of heavy metals along the way – a trail that historians and scientists have been able to detect and use to document almost their every movement, so to speak.
They do that today too.
My dad owns a farm- the stuff we fished out of roadside ditch- including lead batterys - you would vomit knowing about the details.
My understanding was they weren't specifically a mercury-abatement crew, so they probably had detectors for a broad range of contaminants, but not specialized equipment for particular toxins. At least that's how I read it.
I think that when my great-grandmothers were alive (from the late 1800s up to the 1940s) food additives in use that are now banned included red lead, white lead, diethylene glycol, fishberries, opium, cocaine, strychnine, sawdust, vermilion, toxic copper salts (including cupric hydrogen arsenite!), and hydrogenated vegetable oil containing trans fats.
To quote from a 1909 book about one of the pioneers:
The latter part of the eighteenth
and the first quarter of the nineteenth century were marked
by international strife, political upheaval, and suffering among
the toilers. Cobbett, Burdett, and 'Orator' Hunt in 1817
were agitating for Parliamentary reform. Agricultural depression
was extreme, and commercial probity was at its nadir.
For threescore years the food of the people had been poor
and dear. Contemptible and gross adulterations of all
conceivable kinds were everywhere the rule. The dough of
bread was mingled with alum, carbonate of lime, bone ash,
potatoes, and beans. By eking out his sugar with gypsum
chalk, and pipe-clay, the sweetmeat-maker derived unholy
gains; and the pigments used contained lead, chromium,
mercury, copper, sometimes even arsenic. The unwholesome
hues of preserved green fruits and vegetables were due
to boiling in copper vessels, or to the addition of cupreous
salts. Cayenne pepper and curry powder were beautified
by the scarlet oxide of lead. Vinegar was fortified with
sulphuric acid. Canistered fish were tinted red by
ferruginous earths.
Now, some of these are still in use; gypsum "chalk" is harmless and an essential ingredient in many foods; alum is safe up to a certain level, and is an important ingredient in some kinds of pickling; sulfuric acid is perfectly harmless in sufficiently small quantities (it's GRAS, but I think still illegal in vinegar, and dangerously prone to pick up heavy metals); and as far as I know you can still tint your canned fish red with ochre, which is GRAS too. And bone ash won't hurt you, unless maybe it's infected with Mad Cow Disease. The others, though, are dangerous, and now they have very strict maximum permissible levels.
The situation started to improve during my great-grandmothers' lifetimes.
Unfortunately, some of the less toxic preservatives are still in wide use, like nitrate and nitrite, even though these have been convincingly shown to cause stomach cancer.
It’s not apocryphal. My father worked for the US Navy making training and orientation films; one of these was about firefighting and hazardous materials handling on board ship. It included some entertaining segments — for some reason they use (or used, this was the 80s) pure sodium on some ships and they described the difficulty and danger of storing such a substance. The use of a broom to detect invisible but very dangerous leaks from high-pressure steam lines was also demonstrated.
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