Arsenic clothng-dye denial
September 29, 2020 This one's a new one to me:
The Victorians were so obsessed with emerald dye (made from arsenic) that they happily kept wearing it, even though doctors all told them it was poisonous, even with newspapers publishing pictures of skeletons in ballgowns...
— Dr Tansy Rayner Roberts (@tansyrr) September 27, 2020
I've known about tobacco denialism, of course, and how many of the same liars and lies ported over to climate denialism. Before tobacco denialism, we had lead denialism - not just about lead paint and lead gas but even earlier with lead pipe, installed freely over the eastern half of North America (and mostly still there). A brief tangent - it occurs to me that there's a bit of an overlap between using lead pipes and geoengineering. You can avoid the worst effects of both if you're diligent, but if you ever drop the ball in injecting stratospheric haze or forget to watch the pH of water going through your pipes, then really bad things happen.
So, lead denialism goes back at least to the 1920s, but I didn't know about arsenic-dye denial that went even earlier. Add that to the historical record. I wonder if we'll eventually get to scaffold-makers in Salem denying that witchcraft had been disproven.