ABSTRACT
Crookes wrote a large number of editorials on public-health issues during the 1860s and 1870s. For example, in only the fourth issue of Chemical News he discussed the analytical ramifications of a poisoning case in which a druggist at Clifton had sold lead dichromate as a yellow colouring agent for Bath buns. Although there had been no fatalities from this lead poisoning, the case launched Crookes into a long campaign to obtain legislation against food adulteration and the proper training and qualification of pharmacists, druggists and analysts. No one, he wrote, should ‘be allowed to practise as a chemist and druggist without having previously passed an examination of the Pharmaceutical Society’.1 By 1872 he was fulminating because the proposed Public Health Act that set up Local Government Boards did little to amend, simplify or harmonize the existing inefficient sanitary laws.2
