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Mercury is a global pollutant. Evidence from ice cores and lake sediments indicates that mercury deposition has increased significantly due to human activities. Most mercury is released into the environment in inorganic forms, but through methylation it is converted to organic mercury compounds. These compounds can be bioaccumulated into fish and other organisms. Mercury released into water will have regional impacts. Mercury released into the atmosphere can have regional implication, but can also be transported and deposited thousands of kilometers away. The chemistry of mercury is complex and has a strong influence on the global cycling.

Mercury exists in a large number of physical and chemical forms with a wide range of properties. Conversion between these forms provides the basis for mercury's complex distribution in local and global cycles and for its biological enrichment and effects. During recent years, new analytical techniques have become available that have contributed significantly to the understanding of mercury chemistry in natural systems and allow for the determination of total mercury as well as major species of mercury in water, sediments and soils, and biota. This chapter provides an overview of a wide variety of analytical methods that can be utilized, depending on the nature of the sample, the concentration levels of mercury, and what species or fraction is to be quantified.

This chapter reviews and compares possible causes of environmental impacts on lake and river systems in the Arctic and Antarctica, with emphasis on the direct effects of local human activities. Potential impacts fall into three broad categories: physical processes, chemical contamination, and the introduction of exotic species, including microbial contaminants. This review focuses on physical and chemical impacts. Using a range of examples, the chapter illustrates similarities and differences between the Arctic and Antarctic and identifies characteristics of high latitude lake and river systems that may influence their susceptibility to anthropogenic disturbance, including potential cumulative or synergistic effects of local disturbance during a time of rapid global change.

For many communities, exposure to mercury through fish consumption is an exemplary case of environmental injustice. Groups that rely on fishing for food, cultural identity, spiritual wellbeing, or economic prosperity are more vulnerable to mercury pollution. The vulnerability is heightened because sources and hotspots of mercury are found disproportionately in areas near communities of color, low-income and immigrant communities, and indigenous peoples. This chapter reviews cases where mercury has impacted the health, culture, and identity of local communities. Such communities are victims of environmental injustice because they have derived little or no benefit from the products and services of mercury-releasing industries, but they now bear the burden of the wastes left behind. Existing strategies for reducing mercury exposure are not always effective in communities at risk. Fish advisories that warn of health risks from eating contaminated fish themselves perpetuate environmental injustice. The shift in policy from risk reduction to risk avoidance places these communities in a lose-lose situation: either eat fish and suffer the health effects from contaminants or do not eat fish and suffer the health and cultural effects of losing a critical diet food. By allowing significant mercury contamination to remain in place while advising the population at risk to change their lifestyle, regulators are indirectly perpetuating discrimination against communities that attach different normative values to fish.

Persistent, bioaccumulative, and toxic (PBT) pollutants are of concern to environmental and public health policy makers because of their adverse multigenerational effects, which often range far beyond their site of initial release. PBTs, like mercury, that cause neurodevelopmental effects raise additional concerns because of their long-term individual and societal impacts, particularly on children, as well as the ethical consideration of the involuntary nature of the exposure. These attributes underpin the priority status that many states have given mercury pollution, and their focus on precautionary approaches to the issue. Mercury is also subject to atmospheric transport with both long-range and near-field deposition. Atmospheric transport creates important geopolitical policy issues for many states and countries, especially for northeastern states, where local and regional pollution reduction efforts have proven insufficient to address the impacts of many air pollutants from upwind sources. In the United States, innovative environmental policies are frequently initiated at the state level, since federal environmental statutes allow states, in most instances, to establish regulations more stringent than those adopted federally. Concerned by widespread mercury contamination and what many perceive as insufficient federal efforts to reduce mercury pollution over the past decade, the states have taken a leadership role. This chapter highlights some state-level mercury initiatives underway and the roles of science and monitoring in informing and guiding these efforts.

This chapter presents two examples of irreversible proportional disease processes. The first example, the neurobehavioral effects of mercury, is relatively well studied, with a long and tragic history. The second example is much more recent, and there remain many uncertainties about the causal mechanisms by which a recently identified lung toxin — the artificial butter flavoring in microwave popcorn — leads to severe lung disease.

This chapter focuses on the 10th-century Cologne copy of Martianus Capella's Marriage of Mercury and Philology (Ms. 193), particularly of interest along the Platonist lines of the unity of creation and human ethics. Martianus Capella was an African contemporary of Augustine of Hippo, but probably a pagan. His work is in nine books, the last seven of which form a treatise on each of the seven liberal arts (the trivium of grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric; the quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music).

Part I. Distinctive features of Newton’s method: Successively more accurate approximations and increasing empirical support from measurements. Part II. The Mercury perihelion problem: A proposal to alter the inverse-square law ruled out by a more precise measurement. Einstein’s theory accounts for the extra precession and recovers the successful measurements of Newton’s theory. An alternative to general relativity that would answer a new challenge from Mercury is ruled out by a more precise measurement. Part III. Newton does not require or endorse scientific progress as progress toward Laplace’s ideal limit of a final theory. Part IV. Newton’s conception of scientific progress through successively more accurate approximations is not undermined by the classic argument against convergent realism. Part V: Agreeing measurements from diverse phenomena play a decisive role of in transforming dark energy from a dubious hypothesis into part of the accepted background framework guiding empirical research in cosmology today.

This chapter addresses the extremal latitudes of the planets, the maximum elongation of the inner planets, and the planetary periods. The Moon is said to move a greater distance than do the other planets toward each [side] of the circle through the middle of the zodiacal constellations; next in order is Venus, which goes five degrees to each [side] in its chosen motion, then Mercury (up to four degrees), Mars and Jupiter (up to two-and-a-half degrees), [and] Saturn (up to one degree on each side). Mercury effects [superior] conjunction with the Sun in 116 days when the latter comes in between it [and the Earth]; Venus resumes the same position in relation to the Sun in 584 days, Mars in 780 days, Jupiter in 398, Saturn in 378.

Chapter 9 explores the medical marketplace of early nineteenth‐century Britain, with particular reference to tropical invalids and others deemed to have similar complaints. The chapter focuses on the spa resort of Cheltenham which grew rapidly in the early nineteenth century to accommodate large numbers of invalids returning from the tropical colonies. Former colonial practitioners made a good living in the town and some became proprietors of spas. However, competition between them was intense because of the return of many military and naval practitioners to civilian life at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. For some observers, resorts such as Cheltenham epitomized all that was wrong with British society. They were seen as resorts for the feckless and lazy, and as the stamping‐ground of charlatans and quacks. However, they served a vital role in domesticating the Empire and offered hope to invalids returning from tropical service.

During the early eighteenth century, a wide range of medicines, including chemical preparations such as antimonial drugs, was being used to treat tropical complaints. During the 1750s, these were supplemented with mercury, which had hitherto been used predominantly to treat syphilis, and nitric acid, which had seldom been used in any capacity. In the hospitals of the East India Company, these substances were used widely to treat a range of complaints, including hepatitis and fever. Although the practice initially faced great opposition from physicians in Britain, mercury in the form of calomel soon came to be used throughout the British Empire. The same was true for a time of nitric acid, which was endorsed by senior figures in the British Army, as well as by reform‐minded civilian practitioners who saw chemical therapeutics as the key to medical progress.

In the early years of the nineteenth century, medical practice in Britain's colonies changed radically. Having been marginalized in tropical therapeutics since the 1750s, bleeding now began to replace the mercurial therapies that had dominated the previous half‐century. Starting in the West Indies, under the influence of Robert Jackson, and continuing in India under the direction of James Johnson, among others, bloodletting, often combined with ‘stimulant’ practices such as cold bathing, made a remarkable come‐back. The revival of bloodletting depended largely upon the growing acceptance of nervous physiology and the decline of notions of putrefaction. However, it was accompanied by growing interest in the practices of the radical Edinburgh practitioner John Brown which harmonized with the reformist worldview of many practitioners in the tropics, including the turbulent ‘demagogue’ Charles Maclean. In their practices, there remained a role for mercury as a nervous stimulant, together with other substances such as opium.

The historiography of Hispano-United States relations during the Cold War has been dominated for the past thirty years by studies of the latter's negotiations for, and signing of, base agreements with Spain in September 1953. In the post-Cold War era, the significance of the 1953 agreements lies as much in the light that they cast on Spain's role in the global rivalry between Western powers, and shifting power patterns, as in the impact these had on Spain itself. Striking differences in attitude of the United States and Britain towards Spain illuminate their changing roles in the Western Mediterranean, as the gateway to the Middle East to which the Straits of Gibraltar were the key. The question of the western Mediterranean was always closely bound to Spain's Iberian neighbours, Gibraltar and Portugal. The Rock of Gibraltar was the fortress which had long ensured Britain's access to the Mediterranean. Aside from its celebrated rich resources of mercury, copper, and other minerals, the Spanish potential for uranium bearing ores was also of interest to other countries.

This chapter examines the visual performance of Amazonian gold miners and other workers suffering from mercury poisoning. Subjects exposed to mercury displayed a variable degree of spatial vision dysfunction. Both achromatic and chromatic vision were impaired. They had lower achromatic contrast sensitivity and this effect was more pronounced in the medium spatial frequency range. Mercury exposed subjects also had lower red-green and blue-green chromatic contrast sensitivity than control subjects in all tested spatial frequencies.

This chapter examines how depictions of poisonous cosmetics express early modern anxieties about the dangerous powers of seductive spectacles, with an emphasis on the theater. Understood in the early modern period as medicinal or restorative for women, cosmetics, based on substances such as mercury and arsenic, betrayed expectations by proving corrosive and harmful to their wearers. Taking as its starting point a fatal face-painting scene in The Devil’s Charter by Barnabe Barnes, the chapter explores representations of poisonous face-paints in plays, anti-cosmetic treatises, medical writings, and anti-theatrical diatribes. It goes on to demonstrate how this association worked to identify the theater as a seductive poison. Ultimately, it shows that the depictions of women suffering from poisonous face-paint offer a disturbingly literal image of the vulnerability of the body to the invasive force of spectacle.

This chapter chronicles the rise and fall of the famous Mencken/Nathan partnership, their departure from The Smart Set, and the inauguration of The American Mercury, a magazine credited for influencing widespread changes in the magazine industry. It also introduces a new character in the story: the notorious Charles Angoff, who will, in the future, do his best to damage Mencken's reputation.

This chapter picks up from the opening scene described in the Prologue of this book, when the April 1926 issue of The American Mercury was banned in Boston and Mencken was arrested. Mencken became disillusioned when his fight against censorship was criticized by fellow journalists as being a mere publicity stunt, even though his efforts cleared the way for journalists and publishers to publish whatever they want. Worldwide, Mencken's name became forever identified with freedom of speech.