Given my family's struggles with mercury poisoning, I wasn't going to miss the Musée de la Chapellerie (Hat Industry Museum) in Esperaza. We watched a video explaining all the steps of hatmaking, we saw the actual machines involved in the complicated process of turning wool into felt into hats, but there was no mention of mad hatters.
From the Dartmouth Toxic Metals Research Program:
Using mercury in hatmaking was banned in the United States in 1941. Of course, a failure to generalize to other routes of mercury ingestion, along with the decline of the felt hat industry, has meant that there aren't any mad hatters anymore, just autistic children and a lot of people who need drugs for mood problems, hormone problems, and immune problems.
"The felt hat industry has been traced to the mid-17th century in France, and it was probably introduced to England sometime around 1830. A story passed down in the hat industry gave this account of how mercury came to be used in the process: In Turkey, camel hair was used for felt material, and it was discovered that the felting process was speeded up if the fibers were moistened with camel urine. It is said that in France workmen used their own urine, but one particular workman seemed consistently to produce a superior felt. This person was being treated with a mercury compound for syphilis, and an association was made between mercury treatment of the fibers and an improved felt.
Eventually the use of solutions of mercuric nitrate was widespread in the felt industry, and mercury poisoning became endemic."
Using mercury in hatmaking was banned in the United States in 1941. Of course, a failure to generalize to other routes of mercury ingestion, along with the decline of the felt hat industry, has meant that there aren't any mad hatters anymore, just autistic children and a lot of people who need drugs for mood problems, hormone problems, and immune problems.
That night we had so-so pizza in Limoux, but I had my favorite wine so far: blanquette de Limoux, a bubbly white.
It was cold, and tourist season had not yet begun, so Julian and Nellie had the square all to themselves for a postprandial dance. Nellie was not wearing her new hat, which was not felt, and so presumably absent of mercury and urine, either camel or French.
