Nothing as common and dangerous as lead and its derivatives, and I'm not referring to lead people, there are. This heavy metal has already been banned in the manufacture of gasoline, paint, ammunition, toys and other products, and even so lead poisoning or saturnismo (in ancient times, the alchemists called this compound "saturn") is still produced today as it was in the past. Dr. Alice Hamilton She discovered at the beginning of the 20th century that when lead is ingested or inhaled, the body is not able to eliminate it, but instead accumulates in the bones and other tissues. Even small amounts of lead can cause serious health problems. Children under the age of 6 are especially vulnerable to lead poisoning, which can seriously affect physical and mental development. At very high levels, lead poisoning can be fatal.
Being a painter has been a risky profession and not so much because when making the portrait of a nobleman or a monarch the sitter, seeing the results, felt offended, but rather because of the materials used for such noble art. In the work of Bernardinus Ramazzini , De Morbis Artificum Diatribe (1713), considered the founder of modern Occupational Hygiene, it is said:
I can say that as many painters as I have known, I have found almost all of them unhealthy […]. The cause of the cachectic and discolored countenance of the painters, as well as of the melancholic feelings of which they are so often victims, should be sought only in the harmful nature of the colorants.
The dreaded saturnine colic was at that time almost synonymous with "painters' colic". After analyzing the pathobiographical data of some brilliant painters, intoxication by this metal was suspected in several of them due to the use of lead white (basic lead carbonate), minium (lead tetroxide) or Naples yellow (lead antimonate).
Saturn devouring his son by Francisco de Goya
Along with Beethoven, another famous deaf person in history was Francisco de Goya whose life will be marked by a misdiagnosed illness when he was 46 years old and that struck him during a trip to Andalusia. This process was manifested acutely by abdominal cramps, dizziness, visual disturbances, tremors and paresis of the right arm. These disorders left him with an irreversible deafness such that "not using the figures of the hand I cannot understand anything", forcing him to learn the language of the deaf and dumb. The pharmacist María Teresa Rodríguez Torres she demonstrated the cause of that disease in her revealing essay:Goya, Saturno y el saturnismo (1993).