Elizabeth Siddal in a sketch for Ophelia
Ophelia by John Everett Millais, 1852
Extinct: Fowler's Solution.
"Well into the nineteenth century, many women
drank a concoction called Fowler's Solution, which
was really just dilute arsenic, to improve their
complexions. Dante Gabriel Rosetti's wife,
Elizabeth Siddal was a devoted swallower of
the stuff, and it almost certainly contributed
to her early death in 1862.*
*Overcome with grief, her husband buried her
with a sheaf of poems that he had failed to copy;
seven years later he thought better of the gesture,
had the grave dug up, and retrieved the poems,
which were published the following year."
—At Home, by Bill Bryson
