Down, | Beckenham, Kent. | Railway Station | Orpington. S.E.R.
Jan 14/80
My dear Sir,
I am glad that you are calling attention to the arsenic question.1 I cannot answer your question positively, but have hardly any doubt that it was my grandfather Erasmus, as my father never published on medical subjects.2
Hogg had recently published a pamphlet on poisoning from arsenic pigments in wallpaper (Hogg 1879). For more on environmental arsenic poisoning in Victorian Britain, see Bartrip 1994.
No letter from Hogg has been found. Erasmus Darwin discussed the medical uses of arsenic in Zoonomia (E. Darwin 1794–6, 2: 726–28); no publications by him on the dangers of arsenic have been found. CD’s father was Robert Waring Darwin.