Episode 23: What's Your Poison?

In the autumn of 1900, thousands of people in Manchester began falling ill. They were mostly working-class beer drinkers, and the diagnosis was straightforward: alcoholic neuritis, the doctors said. The drinking had caught up with them. For four months, no one looked further. Then one physician at the Manchester Workhouse Infirmary noticed something that didn't fit. What he found changed everything - and almost nothing. This is the story of the 1900 Manchester arsenic beer epidemic: how industrial corner-cutting put poison into the city's pubs, how class assumptions in medicine allowed it to go undetected for months, and how, when the truth finally emerged, the people who suffered most received the least.