Quote:
Originally Posted by DarkCircus
They didn't add copper, it was contamination from the radiator that bootleggers were brewing it in. They coined the condition "absinthism" when they saw the copper flecks showing up in people's eye's, but it was just from bad brewing conditions. They didn't realize for another 20 or so years what the effect of ingesting copper manifested as.
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Actually, no.
A number of distillers did add things like copper sulphate, malachite green and indigo to replicate the color. Also, antimony trichloride was used to replicate the louching effect.
Some symptoms of absinthism (which was more than just eye discoloration) are likely to have resulted partly from those contaminants, but a major part of it was almost certainly simply the effect of alcoholism.
As an aside: absinthe isn't brewed. It's distilled. Though I'm sure you know that.
Using radiators for bootlegging wasn't particularly common around the fin de siecle, both because there was relatively little need to bootleg the (cheap and still-legal) absinthe and because car radiators (the radiators usually used for bootlegging) weren't particularly easy to come by around 1900. Plus, lead poisoning is what's usually associated with using radiators for bootlegging, not copper poisoning.