Image by John Tenniel
Remember the Mad Hatter in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland?
Did you ever wonder why he was called the Mad Hatter?
In Lewis Carroll’s day, people wore hats much more than they do nowadays, and hatmaking (millinery) was a popular business.
The expression “mad as a hatter” evolved from the fact that many people working in the job of making hats ended up suffering from mental problems. Eventually it was established that the cause was the exposure to mercury vapors.
Mercuric nitrate was used as a stiffener for felt used in the hat making process in the 18th to 20th centuries. Many of the shops were not well ventilated in those days and exposure to the mercuric fumes caused serious neurological disorders in the workers.
If you want to know more about mad hatter syndrome, you can google “erethism” (or “erethismus mercurialis”) and find out all kinds of interesting things about it.
It is thought that the character in Alice in Wonderland is based on a friend of Lewis Carroll’s, but it is not established that he had mad hatter syndrome, only that he was a bit eccentric.
Hmm … I think I know a few mad hatters myself.
And here I thought it was just a name in a book.