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Podcast: Today In History with The Retrospectors
Episode: There’s Poison In My Pint
Description: Rerun. Thousands of beer barrels were emptied into the streets across Lancashire on 1st December, 1900 - when it finally dawned on people that the cheap stout they’d been drinking with years was in fact contaminated with arsenic. Over 6,000 victims were poisoned, mostly across Manchester and Salford, thanks to the practice of padding out the barley used in the brew with inexpensive glucose syrup. In this episode, Arion, Rebecca and Olly consider the role that the class system played in the initial diagnoses of mass ‘alcoholic multiple neuritis’; reveal the one company in the supply c...