© 1997 by Society for the Social History of Medicine
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Discussion Point |
The Rise and Fall of Pink Disease
*Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine 183 Euston Road, London NW1 2BE e-mail a.dally{at}wellcome.ac.uk
SUMMARY This paper explores the social and medical history and context of pink disease (acrodynia), a serious disease of infants and young children that baffled the medical world during the first half of the twentieth century until it was shown to be caused by mercury poisoning. In the English-speaking world the commonest source of the mercury was teething powders, which were widely available and advertised with increasing sophistication. Efforts to control them (such as the BMJ's campaign against ‘Secret Remedies’) were as yet unsuccessful. The article discusses the social conditions that influenced the existence and recognition of pink disease, the delay in finding its cause, the way in which it was explained as a virus infection or nutritional deficiency and why it seldom occurred outside the teething period. It discusses both professional and lay attitudes to health and diseases during the early twentieth century and provides a model how the disease developed in a specific social setting and how the medical profession attempted to deal with it within the limitations of contemporary professional thought. The resistance to the evidence of mercury poisoning is typical of resistance to new medical knowledge and declined only when the opponents and sceptics grew old and disappeared from the scene. Meanwhile, the cause having been identified and accepted, pink disease disappeared, but its consequences emerged much later, in an unexpected quater, as a cause of male infertility.
Keywords: acrodynia; azoospermia; calomel; diagnosis; disease and diseases; erythredema; Feer-Swift disease; intertility; ercury; mercury poisoning; patent medicines; pink disease; poisoning; social construction of disease; teething; Young's syndrome
CiteULike 
Connotea 
Del.icio.us What's this?
This article has been cited by other articles:
|
|
 |
|
  M. Waltz and P. Shattock Autistic Disorder in Nineteenth-century London: Three Case Reports Autism, March 1, 2004; 8(1): 7 - 20. [Abstract] [PDF]
|
|
|
|
 |
|
 A. S. Holmes, M. F. Blaxill, and B. E. Haley Reduced Levels of Mercury in First Baby Haircuts of Autistic Children International Journal of Toxicology, July 1, 2003; 22(4): 277 - 285. [Abstract] [PDF]
|
|
|
|
 |
|
 M. Weinstein and S. Bernstein Pink ladies: mercury poisoning in twin girls Can. Med. Assoc. J., January 21, 2003; 168(2): 201 - 201. [Full Text] [PDF]
|
|