Of course, the toxicology lab was now in possession of a nice quantity of pure silver. âAmong the heavy metals which may become deposited in the human body in relatively large amounts,â Gettler wrote, in his report on the case, âsilver is of slight and perhaps least toxicity.â He had died of the pneumonia the only effect that silver doses seemed to have had was to turn him that remarkable deep indigo color. About half the metal was in the muscle tissue, another fourth in the bones, and the rest mostly concentrated in the liver, kidneys, heart and brain.īut the silver hadnât killed the Blue Man. He then measured the silver from each organ, totaling up the results to calculate the whole body content. Gettlerâs conservative estimate was that the Blue Manâs body contained a good three and half ounces of solid silver. He flushed hot water, ammonia and nitric acid through the ashes, washing the silver out of them.
Still, how much metal did his body contain? To find out, city toxicologist Alexander Gettler made an acid solution of the organs and cooked it dry, creating a gray ash. Even the brain shone silver, its familiar curves and coils slightly reflective in the pale light of the morgue.
The resulting autopsy showed that he was blue-silver on the inside too, the membranes smooth and glistening, the muscle tissue a dull-reddish brown with a faint silver tint, the spleen colored a bluish red, the liver bluish gray. But when he died that fall â from rapidly worsening pneumonia â they decided to take a thorough look at his story. As heâd told his circus admirers, he was a freak of nature, he insisted, blue at birth. Their patient firmly denied any silver exposure, denied any self-medication at all. Silver nitrate was easily available used in photographic processing, by dentists to treat ulcers in the mouth, blended into drops that went into the eyes of newborn babies to prevent infections. This was a salt made by dissolving silver into nitric acid and evaporating the solution, leaving behind a glossy powder, which could be mixed for other uses. The Bellevue doctors suspected that the Blue Man, a former British army officer, had achieved his later fame by dosing himself with silver nitrate. The condition was known to deposit silver through the body, staining the tissues to a deeply polished blue-gray. It was that over all effect of polishing that led the doctors to a diagnosis â the Blue Man was suffering from a disease called argyria (from the Greek word argyros meaning silver).
#Colloidal silver blue man dies skin#
The skin was smoothly colored, with an almost lustrous look. This wasnât the exhausted bluish patchiness of cyanide poisoning though. The scleras â what would usually be called the whites of the eyes â were also blue. His skin was so deep a blue to appear black at a distance. His lips were blue his tongue was blue. As his hospital records noted, he was a tall, thin man, with glistening white hair and an equally glossy white mustache. The famed human oddity was 68 years old when he checked himself into the hospital, short of breath and complaining that when he lay flat, he couldnât breathe at all. The man had spent most of his life as one of the human curiosities exhibited at Barnum and Baileyâs, the Greatest Circus on Earth, as it traveled around the country. The Blue Man had recently died at Bellevue the pathologists said his body was one of the strangest theyâd seen stretched on a marble table in the morgue. In the chilly January of 1924, scientists at the New York City Medical Examiner's office got a chance at a true oddball case, the death of the Famous Blue Man. In support of that caveat, in today's post, I'm featuring a short excerpt from my book, The Poisoner's Handbook, which concerns a human circus exhibit and a steady diet of silver nitrate: That not all metals are equally dangerous. The very simple lesson inherent in that story is that a strong dose of metals on a regular basis is generally bad for a person's health.īut one could argue that this is too simple a lesson.
In an earlier post, I wrote about the possible copper poisoning of the great British poet and artist William Blake.
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