Shadows from the Walls of Death

Shadows from the Walls of Death: Facts and Inferences Prefacing a Book of Specimens of Arsenical Wall Papers is an 1874 book by Dr. Robert C. Kedzie (1823–1902) of Michigan.^[1]

Shadows from the Walls of Death

The frontispiece of the book Shadows from the Walls of Death
Author	Dr. Robert C. Kedzie
Language	English
Publication date	1874
Publication place	United States of America
Media type	Print
Pages	100

The book warns of the dangers of then commonly used arsenic-pigmented wallpaper. The book contains 86 samples of said wallpaper. Due to the dangerous amount of arsenic in the work, only five of the original 100 copies have survived. Most copies were destroyed by the recipient libraries.^[2] The extant copies are only handled using special safety precautions.^[2] As of 2021^[update], the remaining copies were held at Harvard University Medical School, the U.S. National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland, and the university libraries of Michigan State University and the University of Michigan.^[3] The copy in the National Library of Medicine has been digitized and is freely available.^[2]

A wallpaper sample from Shadows from the Walls of Death

See also

• Scheele's Green
• Poison Book Project, an initiative aiming to identify and catalogue antique books containing hazardous substances such as arsenic