Decidedly Grim

Today’s Noxious Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Antimony is an element with probably the most colorful history on the period table. Nebuchadnezzar, the king who built the Hanging Gardens of Babylon in the sixth century BC, used a noxious antimony-lead mix to paint his palace walls yellow. Perhaps not coincidentally, he soon went mad, sleeping outdoors in fields and eating grass like an ox. Around that same time, Egyptian women were applying a different form of antimony as mascara, both to decorate their faces and to give themselves witchlike powers to cast the evil eye on enemies. Later, medieval monks – not to mention Isaac Newton – grew obsessed with the sexual properties of antimony and decided this half metal, half insulator, neither one thing nor the other, was a hermaphrodite. Antimony pills also won fame as laxatives. Unlike modern pills, these hard antimony pills didn’t dissolve in the intestines, and the pills were considered so valuable that people rooted through fecal matter to retrieve them and reuse them. Some lucky families even passed down laxatives from father to son. Perhaps for this reason, antimony found heavy work as a medicine, although it’s actually toxic. Mozart probably died from taking too much to combat a severe fever.

Culed from: The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements

Facts