Abstract
Publisher Summary This chapter summarizes the historical record for lead (Pb) toxicity in human populations. This health history of toxic impacts in humans focuses on lead's temporal reach and attempts a systematized look at the evolution of lead toxicology and epidemiology as a public health issue. The chapter tabulates some illustrative fragmented descriptions of Pb toxicity that appeared over the period from the Greco-Roman era to about the seventeenth century and cites some scattered and illustrative poisoning reports in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It presents some illustrations of the intersection in the nineteenth century of lead poisoning as a health issue and the industrial development of societies that produced greatly expanded exposures of diverse human populations to lead as a consequence. The first several decades of the twentieth century produced clear evidence of experimental lead poisoning. A table is given depicting illustrative scientific and public health milestones in the second half of the twentieth century to the present that began to frame lead poisoning as a contemporary public health issue.
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