"The play "Arsenic and Old Lace" is a rather disturbing comedy about a family of serial killers, particularly two eccentric aunts, who poison their victims with spiked elderberry wine. Thus, arsenic burst into popular culture as a means to dispose of kindly though lonely old men.
But arsenic turns out to be multi-talented. And good-looking under the right circumstances. Previous to its central role in the play, arsenic was used – of all places – in wallpaper.
It seems preposterous today, but arsenic was a popular chemical that, when mixed with copper, produced beautiful paints and pigments, according to Atlas Obscura. Near the end of the 19th century, the American Medical Association estimated that as much as 65 percent of all wallpaper in the United States contained arsenic.
Enter Dr. Robert Kedzie, a professor of chemistry at Michigan State Agricultural College and former Union surgeon during the Civil War.
In the 1870s, Kedzie, serving on the state's Board of Health, set out to warn people of the dangers of arsenic-pigmented wallpapers – by creating a poisonous book.
"Shadows from the Walls of Death," printed in 1874, contains about 86 wallpaper samples that each contain arsenic. Kedzie produced 100 copies and sent them to public libraries along with a note of explanation and a warning to librarians not to let children handle the book.
Only four copies remain: two in Michigan (one at MSU and one at the University of Michigan), one at the Harvard University Medical School, and the fourth at the National Library of Medicine, which digitized the entire volume and made it available for free online.
If you want to see one in person, you can visit MSU library's Special Collections division, where it sits on a shelf in a green box, and each page is encapsulated in plastic for safe handling.
