PMID: 11619497Aug 1, 1997Paper

The rise and fall of pink disease

Social History of Medicine : the Journal of the Society for the Social History of Medicine
A Dally

Abstract

This paper explores the social and medical history and context of pink disease (acrodynia), a serious disease of infants and young children that baffled the medical world during the first half of the twentieth century until it was shown to be caused by mercury poisoning. In the English-speaking world the commonest source of the mercury was teething powders, which were widely available and advertised with increasing sophistication. Efforts to control them (such as the BMJ's campaign against 'Secret Remedies') were as yet unsuccessful. The article discusses the social conditions that influenced the existence and recognition of pink disease, the delay in finding its cause, the way in which it was explained as a virus infection or nutritional deficiency and why it seldom occurred outside the teething period. It discusses both professional and lay attitudes to health and diseases during the early twentieth century and provides a model of how the disease developed in a specific social setting and how the medical profession attempted to deal with it within the limitations of contemporary professional thought. The resistance to the evidence of mercury poisoning is typical of resistance to new medical knowledge and declined only when th...Continue Reading

Citations

Jan 8, 2010·Pediatric Cardiology·Howard I Kushner, Carlos R Abramowsky
Dec 14, 2011·Toxicological and Environmental Chemistry·Matthew Garrecht, David W Austin
Nov 4, 2005·Clinical Infectious Diseases : an Official Publication of the Infectious Diseases Society of America·John J Ross
Apr 24, 2007·Pediatric Clinics of North America·Jack C Clifton
Mar 29, 2006·Clinics in Laboratory Medicine·Danyal IbrahimDaniel E Rusyniak
Nov 7, 2016·Environmental Research·José G Dórea
Aug 23, 2003·International Journal of Toxicology·Amy S HolmesBoyd E Haley
Apr 9, 2004·Autism : the International Journal of Research and Practice·Mitzi Waltz, Paul Shattock
Sep 23, 2003·The American Journal of Dermatopathology·Ana María Abréu VélezKen Hashimoto
Apr 10, 2008·The Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal·Howard I KushnerJane C Burns
Jan 25, 2000·Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine·J Black

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