Ancestors' Comfort

Sawdust in the gearbox

Or

Doping your ancestors

The following is anecdotal; and I feel much too lazy to look it up properly right now.

Just reminiscing... about times gone by, back when we used to dope our ancestors to death.

Ancestors' Comfort

This here reminded me of something irritating in my childhood: way back then, people talked ironically of "comforting the ancestors" - and of firing up horses for the race or the sale, like filling sawdust into a worn-out gearbox to have a used car (or horse!) running smoothly for just enough miles to be out of sight and reach when the deception is noticed. Using a poison.   

The subject in question:

Arsenic, aka Ancestors' Comfort; that nickname - or so it seemed - being a sarcastic reference to its murderous aim and quality.

Arsenic was, as far as I remember, a waste product of silver and lead or sulfur mining; known as a rodent poison to protect the crops, it earned its nickname as "Ancestors' Comfort" until the development of the Marsh test, a forensic proof for its administration, which led to some convictions and the practice being dropped.

There may have been quite a few premeditated arsenic murders, yes; this even entered the folklore tales.

But much of it was, perhaps just as likely, aiming to "comfort" or dope the old, putting them out of their physical misery, with benign intent - even if it did mean doping them to their death, which came, if not naturally anyway, from accumulation and overdose. Doping has that quality.

For, way back then, arsenic was being used as a doping compound; not only in athletics, besides other poisons such as strychnine, and in fraudulent horse trading - probably without much consent in both cases - but in general life as well, at least locally.

Never mind the horse dropping dead after the sale; and never mind the boxer dropping dead after the fight. Both were a money-making commodity. And who knows? Perhaps some miners and workers even doped themselves with arsenic, as Andes people chew cocaine leaves to weather the hardships.

How does that work?

Arsenic is a metal that accumulates in the body; and it is closely related to phosphorus, without which life, at least as we know it, is impossible - every human has phosphorus distributed in their body. Of course, so do animals; and even plants need it to thrive and multiply. It is found in the energy proponent ATP in every body cell, especially in the brain and the reproductive organs, and DNA in general.

Industrial mining, while depleting the world's resources of phosphorus, is at this moment in time over-fertilizing the fields and those that live off them; however, phosphorus used to be scarce, for it has the unfortunate property of existing in compounds soluble in water, i. e. it easily gets washed out to sea, where it then over-fertilizes the algae, before being taken out of the system for millions of years while being worked into deposits once again.

So scarce was it in fact, that, in a straight, it lead to cannibalism, directly or indirectly; in pre-industrial times, even the crop fields of Europe were literally being fertilized with the ground bones of dead soldiers left to rot on its battle fields, a gruesome trade if there was one; and, unfortunately again, phosphorus also has (or at least had) a military use, namely to destroy and burn down cities such as Hamburg.

So, as phosphorus deposit mining was developed, much of it did not go into the production of life, but death.

So, what about the arsenic?

Phosphorus and arsenic both belong to the same chemical group; in fact, they are neighbors, and I have heard that arsenic can replace phosphorus in the living cell - up to a point, and perhaps leading to that performance-enhancing effect, before killing off the subject in question via metal poisoning or cancer.

Used as anti-vermin to protect the crops, and household rat poison, it was seemingly quite easy to come by, not just in agricultural surroundings, or where there was metal mining somewhere in the further vicinity. Every larger household probably had a sack of it somewhere.

Taking all of that into account, perhaps it was used to let old people experience a short spring at the unalterable end of their life, comforting them over the pain and the decrepidness that will have befallen them; and this may indeed have also hastened their death, by slowly poisoning them, while developing cancer would have been no problem at that age; hence its nickname of 'Ancestors' Comfort', which may have been used quite unironically.

Of course, it may, just as probably, have been 'accidentally on purpose' overdosed quite often, to get rid of the old, and free the house for inheritance; or perhaps even to show them a bit of mercy and push them over the edge; for instance, if they had cancer already - who knows, perhaps even from using the stuff in their youth? - for which arsenic also seems to have been considered a remedy, strangely enough.

So, in a way, it was a murder weapon with a built-in alibi; why, everyone was doing it! And it did them so well!

And that you had to overdose in the end - well, that's just inevitable, isn't it? And maybe some, yet quite healthy, and not-so-old, family member also found their death… after being just sick, after being a bit fired up for a while. So I suppose they weren't very open about it.

However, once they could prove its administration, the authorities moved in to put a stop to the practice - and probably found that in consequence, that an aging population was now their problem.