Document oMMagMw06OXqxdjp2NrLLDdL7

v- .. /D ysgen ic Lead Poisoning as the Principal Destroyer of Ancient Genius and Culture By S. C. Gflfillan, Ph.D. & 0001466 The greatest disaster yet perceived in history, from eating and drinking the wrong food, was the intellectual decay and ruin of ancient Greece and Rome. We inti of the author are all familiar with how their literature and other arts, their science, progressive ness and apparent genius decayed, losing all "the glory that was Greece, and the grandeur that was Rome," gradually sinking into the night of the Dark Ages and Byzantine stagnation. The slow catastrophe was due to long repeated extermina tion of those who had the capacity to earn, grab, keep or marry money, which capacities are highly correlated with the capacities to create culture, science, pro gressiveness and leadership and to acquire the requisite education both by native gifts and by money for higher education. This class was left almost childless for .u S. COLUM G1LFILLAM at least 18 successive generations in Rome, by various dysgenic (opposite to Ocean Av., Apt. 4*3 eugenic) factors, above all by lead poisoning because the upper-class diet was Uanica, Cl. 9#4fl then full of lead, which as we know can be highly destructive to health, mentality, life, and especially to reproduction in women, as we shall show. i Gprmany, crltthrephold con-- We are not concerned with the Fall of Rome, her military defeat, the break-up of the Empire, nor with economic matters such as the declines of population, wealth, soil fertility, or the coming of malaria, although these economic and political troubles were doubtless real factors in the Fall, and interacted both ways, as cause and effect, with the decays of .culture and innate ability due chiefly to the saturnine poison, which we shall now be telling of. We must speak chiefly of Rome, to which I have had to restrict my research, from about 150 B.C. to the end of the Empire, although there is every indication that the same leaden blow had laid low the genius of Greece, still more cata strophicly, after Aristotle, and greatly reduced population in die Greek homeland. It was evidently the importation of Greek cookery and abundant wine, after the conquest of Greece by Rome about 150 B.C., and the relaxation of an old Roman rule against wives drinking wine, that imported the same dysgenic ruin into Rome. If I can prove the thesis for the Roman Empire, others, better Greek scholars, perhaps one of our readers, will marshal the proof for other lands. Iltloned reflexep Lon which causes lile thip thepip 3f hEDVED on the had received Soviet toxicology nly conditioned oner., are applied in 'nan, if. pop- been found to c changep in the ir had induced an environment of iplicatlon of getatlve dyptonia, of liver and Many theories have been offered to explain the decay of genius and culture, . The average and especially for those military and economic disasters. But none have been proved, they Sometimes contradict each other and all have been dismissed as mere speculations. We present here a new theory which can be proved, by such reliable sciences as Chemistry, Toxicology and Archeology. To be sure, some of the prior speculators were on the right track, in observing that the Roman aristocracy came to have very few children, continually replaced by children of le lead concenep with the max, plnce bo th val orption in the poor men, slaves and foreigners; but they had only guesswork as to the cause of this aristothanasia, death of the best. Many of the theories blame stupid mistakes of government, such as civil wars, or bureaucratic rigidity; but why did the rulers become stupid? . the Federal Re , too low. Indeed, uced, pince very Reprinted from JOURNAL OF APPLIED NUTRITION, Vol. 19, Nos. 3 & 4, 1967 pychologlc teptp, Unfortunately d r .t~mt S. COLUM GILFILLAM,H.X9. e of course not 1301 Ocean Av., Apt 403 gatorr. ehrink Santa- Monica, Ca. 90401 titutep, which n **w < ___ _________ iRT hap reported that the Inp'titut Khimicheakoi Flaiki in Moecow hap already checked the mutagenic effects of hundredp of induptrial pubptancea, and found that the mutational rate from pome of them exceedp that from the radio activity which provoked conplderable publicity during the A-bomb teptp. whether lead wap among those checked pubptancep cannot yet be paid. BERSIK hap referred to the high and frequency Of a n k e d 1 f t-h p malf orma tion. f-n t -i' 1 C-- in the lead N5900 I ss JOURNAL OF APPLIED NUTRITION Anyone with the slightest idea of Eugenics can see what would happen genius, culture and progress, if nearly all who could earn, grab, keep or marrV a money were repeatedly removed from a mixed race. Countless sociological studies! Ashes ^ have shown that just about every good quality in humans is associated, positively) excrete . correlated, with relative wealth status. It is always true on average* within a\ cT aC^a^ community, that the higher the wealth by birth, the higher the average achieve- \dea^ ' ment and excellence. Of course this truth is one of average, and binds no in a much dividual--a-poor man may always happen a genius, but his chance is much less imprt,a than if he were born of wealth. steriVA- Nigh two centuries ago the first great historian of technology, Beckmann, noticed that the wines of the ancients must have been often poisoned with lead, from the instructions given by Cato, Pliny, Palladius and others, to boil the wine or the fresh juice in leaden vessels, in various cases. In 1880 an Austrian chemist, : death, 1 -whoca' for the ; pedici K. B. Hofmann, followed by Kobert, a German toxicologist, and lately the Canadian-American physician Lloyd G. Stevenson, worked up the ancient evi Europ . were t dence very thoroughly, proving beyond a doubt that "the ancients", really mean ing their aristocracy, must have been highly lead poisoned, accounting for their infertility, as History records. Few of the Emperors, e.g. had a son to succeed him, whence the recurrent civil wars over the succession. Yet still scarce any attention has been paid to those German chemists' remarkable and proved thesis. For historians are never interested in diet, chemistry, medicine nor eugenics. And everyone overlooked the class angle, which I rise to supply' which alone ; o n Vil 1 condi what bir* easfl the aCu gives to ancient plumbism its vital significance, both for History and for present- I day population policy. If "the Jiomans", in quotes, were lead poisoned, what of it? It seemed a mere curiosity of history. But if we now perceive that it was not the cl ito Romans in general, but their upper class who were thus poisoned, mentally \>r damaged and left nearly childless, this explains their continuous dying out, and the disappearance of science, art, progress and genius. Also the eugenist sees here a frightening parallel to the quite similar situation in the world today. For today our intellectual and well-to-do classes, and the races and nations that con l* Si V r tribute 99% of the world's progress, are barely maintaining their numbers, while the lower classes, and the backward nations and races, are about doubling in each generation. But before talking of the genetic consequences, we should better explain what happened medically; and first of all we may need a little more acquaintance with lead poisoning, the ancient uses of lead, and the diets of the Roman rich and poor. : | Chronic lead poisoning comes by taking in a very little lead7repeatedly. One mg. has been called the largest safe daily dose, 1/28,000th of an ounce; but it seems likely that every bit of it is a little bit harmful, since no one has ever found any benefit from lead. Prof. Clair Patterson, who has been studying lead in our atmosphere and in the snows of yesteryear on Greenland and Antarctica, finds a great increase there in the last two centuries. He also finds we have in our bodn ' about 100 times as much lead as might be considered normal, on the basis of t > percentage of lead in the earth's surface. The threshold of safety, for lead in > blood, is considered in Europe to be but 0.5 ppm.; our typical Amerit.in - - j 0001467 m 4 OF A p PLiEr * UT* m a (>f Eutrenir DYSGENIC LEAD POISONING 97 1('trly all n can see "* a mfved COW .' " iv ./di K s' abvaVs , TVAat u'Ou/d i, ssg,rca.b_,>k, eeeefn OPr Petl ***> if of that. We receive lead daily from gasoline and other burnt sources in the , and from vegetable and sea foods, soldered cans, lead glaze scraped off S assciater! studi< dies, and from soldered pipes, paint, etc. When we take in more than we can crete it builds up in our bones, still seeming harmless. But too much leads to > aP l* ,, ," TM-e- or,[f a,y L _ th e""a*iv-craag"e a *r- *` t naciation, constipation, local paralysis, insanity, many other disorders, and S^nitis, Jjnt }}j g6' !lnd binds levejceath. Roman tombstones, for those who could afford that modest luxury, indicate ls chaa,,n_c_e . s no jjjl shortened life-span, especially among women of child-bearing age. More Storia,, , 5 mnci ;es.sfi nportant for our tliesis, lead reduces fertility in men, and in women brings C... Sa `Vadiu's- ,,j CnrPoVison'e.r! Bee J.cir>ailn, s erility, abortion, stillbirth, and premature births, which in turn foster early i Bath, or permanent mental impairment. Lead is especially deadly to children, a CeerTMau fl JS80 a V bl7 H * Steveonson, u v ho can also acquire it from floor dust, etc. This pathologic situation, so disastrous : r the healthy survival of offspring, is to be verified not so much from modern b edicine, which watches for, detects and cures lead poisoning early, as from it';l'e1a'd iI1Per0lr,s0 o n e ,J e" fs . really evioiean- ^, "t/3,(pJ s o c e e s Z ' "ctau aT sPon^LZ r beir 3 uropean medical records of 50 or 100 years ago, when protections for workers v-ere few, and even if these knew they were being lead poisoned they would work <`H until they dropped in convulsions, because they had to have that job. Such conditions were similar to those of the Roman aristocracy, who had no idea of S`f. * t e ' r e J ^ , ** ^ e and / ***, arce any >ce. J " me(iie nroTMr Ved Sis. ":" *-" h"^> ><; :Z.ier,':"si't'^rypya\bnr'rfiP:r-::"och1s"rloMcs- ul-ee Poned f0ri PPrreesSef'nt- hat their food and drink were doing to them. So the recorded extremely low birthrate and high infantile and adult deathrates of the Roman aristocracy are easily explained. Yet because of lead's insidious, slow onset and varied symptoms ti;e ancients scarcely recognized it, except as a disease of lead workers, or an acute poisoning from a known heavy dose. Now about this saturnine metal. It is the easiest of all to produce, and the only cheap metal the ancients could past end weld. since they could not cast nor weld ,IiS tbcir co r S Poisned ** the nci Scnius 7 " ' d v w ^ enfa% iron, nor weld copper. Moreover it was provided in superabundance as a by product of silver mining. The silver mines at Laurion, fountain of Athens' pros perity, produced 250 times as much lead as silver. So they used the lead whole sale, for pots, cups, colanders, toys, tickets, pencils, boxes, roofs, cisterns, ci races. con- VVe she a'-c ah ollnt t^ohnerbsl''lnwShiilne water-pipes, repairing wine jars, Pompeiian red paint, glazed pottery latterly, and in lead bronze and pewter. Lead pipes were a great source of poison (save with hard water), yet not so significant, since rich and poor drank the same water. Still lead pipes were more used in city than country, and brains always flock to the city. The lead most significant dysgenicly was ceruse face powder (since lead at breathed in is ten times worse than lead eaten), red wall paint, olive oil, and lead ' and {~'V)()0tl of rePeatedly above all the leaden or lead plated bronze pots for cooking, heating and someSi'l times storing the wines and fruit and honey foods of the rich. Tlie poor cooked and stored in unglazed pottery; the rich could afford bronze, so much better for looks, and for conducting heat than the weak and porous * ancient pottery, like our terra cotta. But with bronze, the rich knew that they must avoid copper poisoning, which reveals itself at once. So they substituted a leaden utensil, or a bronze pot with an internal plating of lead or tin or an alloy of the hvo, and the poisoning went practically unrecognized. And the thin plating is nudjy recognized by modem archeology, since it will disappear electrolyticly 'hiring 15 centuries in moist ground. If they used pure tin they were alright; but <`ad was 12 times cheaper, and easy to confuse with tin, So they put lead into 98 JOURNAL OF APPLIED NUTRITION the better grades of wine in a dozen ways, including warming it before server \v\va^eV^ otn c(.\uc in cool weather. Most important were the common practices of boiling the muspeciaV j ^ %vere u the fresh juice, to sterilize it, or boiling it down to a grape sirup, which they useivhonIY e\yy a h ' to add flavor, bouquet and keeping power to wines, and to sweeten luxury foodteans ay,\e so Four ancient writers tell us this sirup must be made in lead, scraping the pot aihe , ^ad ^ it boiled down. It's a good recipe for making slow poison, if you have an enemy'aipv y cTaCy. For sweetening foods they had no sugar, but only this sirup, or other fruitsne aAsto s^ 0t' boiled down in lead usually, or scarce honey, also sometimes leaded. Mat1^ ^ ^ w d d 1 The poor had no such luxury foods, nor face powder nor red wall paint. They dutiufttu t). ate mostly porridge cooked in pottery, along with some of bread, vegetables and ':amd'eS' oCess our other usual foods. Thev did drink a good deal of wine, but it was apparently euSeil^c re a rarely processed by those 'baneful leading sophistications; it was fresh from the today ai fermenting vat, and would not keep long. In any case we know that in the imperial period the numbers of the poor did X A u i a gTM llrctun' lX not decrease much, perhaps to one-half, though population fell much farther in Greece. The poor survived, and continually replaced their perishing masters, tUeEgV sawiVbackA wherefore they must have had a high birthrate, and not too high a deathrate. I'm wahn1 Among the well-to-do we must consider other checks beside lead. Venereal disease was not then important, but there was considerable homosexuality; and there were political proscriptions sometimes of the rich and leaders of defeated factions. But these were commonly older men, whose leaded wives would have had no more children anyway. Divorce, very prevalent, would not have checked births much. Birth control was often attempted, but apparently was not the major factor, except in preventing illegitimate children, of whom we never hear. There was some infanticide, especially of the sickly, the poor and the slave-born. There was an extraordinary amount of celibacy, which would have been partly caused by lead. For the main motive for marriage was to raise children, heirs; ! * " ' a n * 5; " . Womans specim ^ well sciewtiftc needed- In am can eh out, T otherwise men would prefer their freedom. So if an heir could rarely be pro and P1' duced, why marry? Long hot bathing by men of leisure might have been a factor after 100 B.C. We face, then, considerable uncertainty as to the relative strength of the numerous factors making for aristothanasia, though lead seems the worst. But nw from the eugenic point of view the relative weights of the causes do not need determining. It suffices to know that their total, joint dysgenic effect was so in m ;inc" crushing that something like 3/4 of the well-to-do died out of each generation. A geneticist or any stockbreeder or layman of common sense knows what must happen to any mixed population, if for 18 successive generations you remove 3/4 of the phenotypes who show certain traits, in our case all the traits which enable people to earn, grab wholesale, keep or marry money. "Blessed are the meek," said the Beatitude, "for they shall inherit the earth." They did, and the result was ruin. At first, of course, the ablest of the poor could replace the perishing wealthy fairly well. But after 18 generations of this fishing- out process there would be little ability left in the poor either. Our thesis must even be accepted by those of egalitarian sympathies, who refuse to accredit Eugenics for humans, though all do for animals and plants. figli or PpLlET J*u Tnn ch2<?n w-u. . t u ere , a-Vs- md `Jip' t\v.aryr 'n,0oi-7j'n? i t 0(//o"0-1n71" 1011 1prraacctuf iefor DYSGENIC LEAD POISONING 99 r .vhatever qualities we do not get by heredity, we must get from environment, "top ' 0r m" "," f !>e m ,,j'-aao"/d, ;(os,ruvpL- '* h`.ch lev * feaTM ' l i ! i ' usi, e eially from education. Under ancient Roman conditions higher education and ronment were inseparably tied to birth--there were no scholarships nor other ns whereby a boy or girl born poor could obtain higher education and culture, ^ i r ? * - C s ty * poT highly able son of a slave or poor peasant might succeed to a vacant chief- j>; but he had no way to acquire the culture, family traditions nor prestige of ? 'd n5 f 0'vc,to p o ^ ' ea* 4 *rui$h aristocracy. lany questions remain, which beg for answers I cannot give. When and how SoPhis1-0i " Ji5e>b u t^ ' Veel:ablei/le^l^1 *n5 ^ e Middle Ages did the rich learn to shun lead and have large and plural S 2cat/ons. ^ Xvas anMf,r iilliiees, wwhillee tthe cchhiillddrreenn noff ttheirr npnonorr serff s mmnostlyv ddied? TThheenn NNaattuurre''s nnoorrmmall n 'Vas f ^ h ^ ar('ntlyl enic process, the survival of the fittest, must have resumed operation, so that T S L t * ,h n i>rnbe today are all descended largely from the nobility of the Middle Ages, those ) could grab and keep land, who were neither weak, nor the gentle, moral, llectual and artistic types who became religious celibates. Again, what about thi Egyptians, great users of beer, wine and lead, whose civilization three times sar x back to near Barbarism? f ,1ien- ry " }obns,e,, ],eiar1nddle' vaedr^s Pre'-a/enf J ^ ^ v e s '0flaI,,ty- ; and eated ^ P te d , h ' XVo" l d n o t l ^ d h a )U<?te**c1>*d.d. rZcn y iiilrentlv f *hom oncv cheeke not rr'se y * > So <f a n h ! rraaisee c i,u " " r m ly W / l ^ N pro t e e " ? facto, m making a book of it, and for best proofs want pay dirt, from the bottom of excavated anaphoras that once contained wine, grape sirup or olive oil, to Ui-ayze for lead. And best of all for this old dog, old bones, of rich and poor Romans respectively, preferably ribs. In Europe I managed to gather 40 bone specimens. Their assay for lead was consistent with theory, but they were not well chosen, only such as I could get, nor sufficient. If I had the backing of some scientific foundation I could visit European museums and get such specimens as needed. ' In any case let us learn from Rome's catastrophic dysgenic proof, that a race can change rapidly by internal selection, and that to allow the intelligent to die out. or to be swamped under as today, can utterly ruin brains, science, culture and progress, as well as civilization itself. 'to, t,.,,t atreng,, . K h ah ,t.rss. oo ff tf/illeeSeceairu>sset,h e , t n 0f the Ursf- Bat f? 2 ^ ? ^ f,i heed each VVas J Benerakn,on. x r<,,,r - e " 'hat must v remove - monev. dloy e fra/ts wh/c/j ;'nBje aabhJ/3e^st Co hrf t tthble earth B IB L IO G R A P H Y Tli.: a u th o r has w ritten m ore extensively on th is subject, w ith citations from a n cien t w riters, etc ., on Lead Poisoning and the Fall of Rome" , in Jol. of O ccupational M edicine, 7 :53-60, and an equivalent article ln M ankind Q ly., b o th of F e b ., 1965. F o r g re a te r m ed ical info, a n d h u n d re d s of quotations a n d citations o f inciett authors, see '*`arl B. H ofm ann: die G etrnke d e r G riechen u n d R m er vom hygienischen S tan d p u n k te; in A rchiv f. G esch. der Medizin 6:26-40 & 269-88, 1883. ^fmann; das Blei bei V lkern des A ltertum s, separately or in Sam m lung gem einverstndlicher wis senschaftlichen Vortrage 20:565-612, 1885. Rudolf K obert: C hronische B leivergiftung im klassischen A ltertum ; in B eitrage aus d e r G eschichte d e r Oi Chem ie, in m em . of G . W . A. K ahlbaum , 1909, pp . 103-19. ltr<-*y P. M cC ord, ed. o f th e Jol. of O c. M ed. above; L e a d a n d L e a d P ip in g in E a rly A m erica, 1954, 44 pp., with some attention to ancient tim es; pub. also in Indus. M ed. & Surgery, vols. 22, 23. W uburger: Tech. Arts & Sciences of th e Ancients, 1930. - C. P atterson; C o n tam in ated a n d N a tu ra l L e a d E nvironm ents of M an; A rchives o f E nviron. H e alth , 11:3 4 4 60, 1965. Lloyd G. Stevenson: A H istory of L ead Poisoning, D is., J. H opkins U ., 1949, unpub., 437 pp. Stofen: Neues zum Umwelgift Blei, w. spec, attention to Russian findings; VitalstofFo-Zivilisation*krankheiten, 1966, No. 6.