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Was Abraham Lincoln a Victim of Mercury Poisoning?
Did the responsibilities of the presidential
office weigh heavy upon Abraham Lincoln's shoulders? This is highly probable.
In fact, it would be surprising if they didn't. A study by the University
of Chicago Medical Center reveals that Lincoln may have suffered from bouts
of depression, anxiety and insomnia.
Also, during the 1850s, Lincoln became extremely
aggressive, even to the point of violence. According to a study published
in the summer 2001, issue of Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, Lincoln
was taking a medication common at that time for depression, known as "Blue
Mass." Other ingredients of "blue mass" were liquorice root, rose-water,
honey, sugar and rose petals The daily dose of these pills contained over
9000 times the amount of mercury that is considered safe by today's standards.
Some of the symptoms as you may know of mercury poisoning are aggression
and severe mood swings. Could Lincoln's violence, then, have been caused
by the pills? When he stopped taking them, his aggressive behaviour is said
to have disappeared.
During the civil war, illness and disease
caused more deaths than did the battles. The soldiers died of many different
causes, but it should be noted that a commonly prescribed medication was
a concoction of mercury and chalk called, again, blue mass. Perhaps the
medication was the actual cause of some of the illness and death.
More Civil War soldiers died from diarrhoea
than were killed in battle. Indeed, more than twice as many soldiers died
from various illnesses than were killed as a result of battle. The soldiers
lived in unhealthy conditions: they were often poorly fed and crowded together
in unsanitary camps. Epidemics would sweep through encampments and take more
fearful tolls than the worst battle. Most diseases were little understood
and quite often the treatment administered to the sick soldier did more harm
than good. The universal ailment of all soldiers, and the deadliest, had
many names. The soldiers would call it "Tennessee trots", "Virginia quick
steps", or "the bowel complaint". Doctors labelled it "debilitis", "dysentery",
or "diarrhoea". Treatments for diarrhoea varied according to the doctors'
whims and the available medications. A Union soldier admitted to a Philadelphia
hospital with the complaint of a three-month case of chronic diarrhea was
treated with heavy doses of lead acetate, opium, aromatic sulfuric acid,
tincture of opium, silver nitrate, belladonna, calomel, and ipecac. The soldier
died after two weeks of treatment. It is no wonder that many soldiers regarded
admission to a hospital as a death sentence and would endure a great deal
of suffering before resorting to that alternative.
THE MAN WHO SHOT LINCOLN'S ASSASSIN
 That
isn't the end of linking Abraham Lincoln to Mercury Poisoning, the man is
linked by another means. As most people know, John Wilkes Booth was the man
who assassinated Lincoln; Boston Corbett was the man who killed John Wilkes
Booth.
Boston Corbett was born in London in 1832
and emmigrated to the USA with his family. He became a hatter in Troy. He
later moved to Boston and continued working as a hatter. Corbett was plagued
with mental problems. He became a reborn evangelical Christian while in Boston
and this is where he took his new name from. He became a fanatical Christian
and reform became his purpose in life. Trying to imitate Jesus, Corbett grew
his hair very long. He was known to many people as an 'eccentric'.
In 1858, he already showed signs of a mental
problem. The first clear physical symptom he had of mercury poisoning was
numbness. One example of his eccentricity took place in July 1858. In order
to avoid the temptation of prostitutes he castrated himself with a pair of
scissors. (The actual hospital record or this still exists at the Massachusetts
General Hospital.) The numbness caused by the mercury poisoning is thought
to have helped him to be able to castrate himself without much pain.
Corbett joined the Union arm at the outbreak
of the Civil War and finally became a sergeant in the 16th New York Cavalry.
In 1865 he was selected as one of 26 cavalrymen to pursue John Wilkes Booth.
Corbett and the others cornered Booth in a tobacco barn in Virginia. The
barn was set on fire and as Booth moved about inside Corbett shot and killed
him. A religious fanatic, Corbett explained his actions by saying "God Almighty
directed me". He was technically arrested but charges were later dropped.
Afterwards Corbett returned to being a hatter.
in 1887, after overhearing a conversation at the Kansas House of Representatives
in Topeka, which mocked the opening prayers, Corbett jumped to his feel and
pulled out his revolver. No one was hurt but he was arrested and declared
insane and send to Topeka Asylum for the Insane. In 1888 Corbett jumped on
a horse that had been left at the entrance to the asylum's grounds and escaped.
It is not known for certain what happened to him.
 Everybody
knows about Sir Isaac Newton and the falling apple, but not many people know
about Newton's love of Alchemy.
Alchemy for those who do not know is the belief
that metals such as lead and mercury can be turned into gold. For over 30
years Sir Isaac Newton's passion was Alchemy. Newton kept extensive notes
but never formally published anything about his chemical investigations,
probably because at the time such activities were frowned upon. The royals
feared that if an alchemist discovered an easy way to make gold, the country's
monetary system would be destroyed. On this account, they had nothing to
fear from Newton. His genius does not appear to have extended to chemistry.
Isaac Newton, by all accounts, was not a pleasant
man. As a youngster he had battled with his stepfather and even threatened
to burn his house down. He hated the man with a passion for forcing him to
live with his grandmother, separating young Isaac from his mother. Later
in life, Newton showed psychotic tendencies characterized by occasional
withdrawal from human contact, fits of anger and periods of depression. His
battles with other scientists over details of his theories were ferocious.
Newton did not take criticism well. For those of you reading this who are
or have been mercury poisoned, I'm sure you will recognise all of these symptoms.
According to his notes, Newton began to dabble
in alchemy around 1687, after reading the works of George Starkey, an American
who wrote under the pseudonym of Eirenaeus Philalethes (peaceful lover of
truth). Starkey was educated at Harvard where he was introduced both to alchemy
and medicine and spent his life looking for the "universal remedy." This
was some vaguely defined potion that could change substances from one form
to another and cure disease.
Starkey believed that the ancient Greeks and
Romans had discovered the secret and encoded the procedure in mythology.
He was particularly taken by the story of Vulcan, the husband of Venus, who
caught his wife in a delicate situation with Mars. Vulcan didn't like this
one bit and hung the two cavorting lovers in a fine metal net for all Olympians
to see. In alchemy, Venus stood for copper, Mars for iron and Vulcan for
fire. Somehow, George Starkey "interpreted" the mythological story and heated
a mixture of copper, iron and stibnite (antimony sulphide) to create a beautiful
purple copper-antimony alloy he called "the Net." It wasn't clear what "the
Net" was supposed to do, but it clearly interested Newton because he left
exact instructions for its production. Chances are that Newton believed "the
Net" to be a key substance in alchemy, perhaps needed to turn metals like
mercury into gold.
This is where it gets really interesting because
Newton's notebooks describe heating mercury compounds and tasting concoctions
brewed with the element. And it is during this period of Newton's life that
he began to show mental disturbances and began to suffer from sleeplessness
and auditory hallucinations. These are all symptoms of mercury poisoning!
Unfortunately, if Newton was indeed poisoned by mercury, it was for nothing.
As far as we can tell, his chemical exploits never amounted to anything
significant. In 1692 Newton suffered a mental breakdown. It is thought that
this was due to his inhalation of mercury during his alchemy
experiments.
So do we look to mercury for an explanation
of Newton's behaviour? A tantalizing clue emerges from a lock of hair, belonging
to Newton, kept at Trinity College in England. In 1979
it was analysed and was shown to have a mercury
level of about 200 parts per million as compared with a normal level of roughly
5 parts per million.
Newton was often referred to as "mad as a
hatter".....it has also been documented that he had Asperger's Syndrome,
a very mild form of autism. We all know the link between mercury and
autism....don't we?
Author
Author Louisa May Alcott, author or 'Little Women' (a book based on her life
growing up with her 3 sisters) amongst other books, died of mercury poisoning.
Louisa was born in Pennsylvania in 1832. During
the American Civil War, Louisa was a nurse. She contracted typhoid fever,
and although she recovered, she suffered the lasting effects of mercury
poisoning. At the time, doctors used Calomel, which was a drug laden with
mercury to cure typhoid. With the poisoning beginning to take it effect,
Louisa still managed to write her final novel titled 'Jo's Boys', which was
published in 1886. Louisa died 2 days after her father, on March 6 1888 in
Boston Massachusetts, at the age of 56.
American Actress
(Melrose Place & Beautiful People)
 Daphne
Zuniga thought she was one of the healthiest people
she knew. She is very health-conscious, does yoga, meditates,
hikes, runs and doesn't eat meat. Not being a meat eater she ate a lot
of fish for her primary source of protein. Tuna being her favourite
as well as yellowtail sushi which she describes as "clean, nutritious,
melt-in-your-mouth and yummy. She was eating tuna four times a week.
Every time she grilled fish or ordered it in a restaurant
she felt that she was making healthy choice.
Daphne had been experiencing an array of
mysterious health problems. In addition to severe headaches, she had cramping
in her fingers and feet. She also frequently felt "a sort of tingling, as
if someone was tickling you, all up and down my body and on my legs, and
it got more and more pronounced," she said in a recent interview. She
was finding that she was unable to remember her lines even
though she'd learned them the night before.
She was having crying spells, low-grade depression, loss
of memory and brain fog. She would be talking to someone and suddenly
become disorientated.
Then in February 2004, after eating
sushi four times in one week Daphne broke out in a rash all over her body
that sent her to the emergency room of her local hospital. She saw
all sorts or doctors but nobody mentioned mercury poisoning. In the
October Daphne read an article about how one in six women
of childbearing age having elevated mercury levels. This prompted
her to get herself tested for mercury poisoning. She was horrified
to hear the doctor tell her that the amount of mercury in
her body was double the normal 'safe' level.
Daphne immediately stopped eating fish and
began a detox programme and dramatically lowered the mercury level.
Six months later her symptoms of cramping and tingling were gone,
her mind was clearer and her mood had improved. At the present
time (October 2005) Daphne is still drinking shakes with protein powder
that contains glutathione, a protein that binds to toxins like mercury
and helps the body get rid of them.
Daughter
of Elvis
In the period following her split from Michael Jackson, Lisa
Marie's health colapshed. Her body started to deteriorate.
She began to have panic attacks and went through 2 years
of baffling every doctor from the East to West Coast of America.
One week she had asthma..then hypoglycemia, then candida, reflux...a
whole host of symptoms. Her gall bladder stopped working and hse had to
have an operation to remove it. Her body just fell apart
and nobody knew what was wrong with her.
She became allergic to many things and lived on a diet
of chicken and broccoli for a year.
She then went to see a homeopathic
doctor, told him all her symptoms, and he asked her to
open her mouth. He told her to get her amalgam fillings removed.
She is now experiencing good health once
again.
Inventor
of Electricity
Michael Faraday was the son of a blacksmith.
He born in Newington Butts, which is near the present-day Elephant &
Castle in South London and was one of 10 children. His family was poor and
he had to educate himself. He became apprenticed to a bookbinder at the age
of 14. During his 7 years apprenticeship, he read many books. He read about
science and became enthralled with the subject especially electricity. This
led him to get a job as a laboratory assistant at the Royal Institution in
London and he eventually rose to become the Institution's Director and one
of the most accomplished experimental researchers of all time. He had been
offered the Presidency of the Institution and a knighthood but he refused
both.
He achieved many things in his lifetime, one
of them being the construction of the first electric motor and the discovery
of both the principle and the method whereby a rotating magnet can be used
to create an electric current in a coil of wire. This is the apparatus which
demonstrates the principle of the electric motor:
The upper end of a stiff wire is
suspended in such a way that
it is free to rotate. The lower end of the wire is immersed in the
liquid metal MERCURY and is free to move.
The wire and its suspension form part of an
electrical circuit
that can be supplied with electric
from a battery. In the middle
of the pool of MERCURY, next to the wire, is
a short cylindrical
magnet. When an electric current is passed
through the wire
it moves around the magnet. The use of MERCURY allows the
current to continue flowing even though the wire
is moving.
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This was a brilliant achievement for Faraday
and we must thank him today for his experiments and for giving us electricity
as we know it, but he put his life at risk doing them. As you have read above,
mercury played a big part in his experiment and it must have taken him hours
upon hours to have found the principle of the electric motor..hours of breathing
in the vapour given off from the mercury.
Faraday discovered chemical substances such
as benzene, invented the system of 'oxidation numbers', and liquefying gases
such as chlorine. He also discovered the laws of 'electrolysis' and made
popular the terminology such as 'anode', 'cathode', 'electrode' and
'ion'.
Faraday almost always worked alone and did
so until a failing memory (the mercury?) betrayed him. His last public lecture
in 1862 was especially memorable. Normally a brilliant lecturer, Faraday
was forced to quit halfway through because he could nto remember what to
say! He sat down after commenting that he had "been with them too long" and
the audience rose to give him a standing ovation. You can see how this affected
him in a letter he wrote not long after to a life-long friend:
"Again and again I tear up my letters, for
I write nonsense. I cannot spell or write a line continuously. Whether I
shall recover - this confusion - I do not know. I will not write any more.
My love to you."
Many people at the time suspected he was poisoned
by mercury, which he used extensively in his electrical experiments.
King Charles II was born on 29 May 1630.
(Same day as me...but I'm not THAT old!) He ascended the throne on
January 30 1649 and was king until
his death on 6 February 1685. Hi father, Charles I had
been executed in 1649, following the English Civil War, the
monarchy was then abolished and the Kingdoms of England and Scotland became
a republic under Oliver Cromwell, the Lord Protector. In 1660,
shortly after Cromwell's death, the monarchy was restord under
Charles II.
King Charles II was a practicing alchemist/chemist
who had his own laboratory. Later in life King Charles experienced personality
changes and began behaving oddly. He later died of kidney failure. It is
thought that these changes in his personality and odd behaviour and the cause
of his kidney failure, were due to mercury poisoning. As well as breathing
in the fumes of the burning mercury whilst practiscing alchemy, he probably
had mercury enter his system by way of medication. King Charles was also
known to have suffered from syphilis and the main ingredient in the medicine
used to treat syphilis in those days was mercury.
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Lyn Rennick 2005
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