The Truth About Deadly Victorian Wallpaper

A serious inquiry was mounted by one English medical doctor after treating an entire family who had mysteriously fallen sick, including four children who died. As part of that process, the doctor, Thomas Orton, used the process of elimination, suspecting that what might have stricken the family and killed the children could be environmental. The water supply was safe, Orton found out. Nor did he find anything else where the family was living that might be the root cause of the malady. Nothing, that is, save the particular shade of green wallpaper on the walls of their home, per Smithsonian Magazine.

The notion that certain wallpaper could actually kill people was nothing new, especially in continental Europe. So long as people weren't eating it, though, Victorians figured the wallpaper was safe. But could something in how the wallpaper was created — or even the dyes used to produce those colors — be sickening consumers all over the world? And what could possibly be so poisonous as to kill a person without even being ingested?

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