Pont-Saint-Esprit

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Administration
Commune of Pont-Saint-Esprit Saint Saturnin Church and the medieval bridge over the Rhône River
Location
Longitude	04° 38' 57" E
Latitude	44° 15' 27" N
Country	France
Region	Languedoc-Roussillon
Department	Gard
Arrondissement	Nîmes
Canton	Canton of Pont-Saint-Esprit (chief town)
Mayor	Gilbert Baumet (2001-2008)
Statistics
Altitude	36 m–187 m (avg. 59 m)
Land area¹	18.49 km²
Population² (1999)	9,265
- Density (1999)	501/km²
Miscellaneous
INSEE/Postal code	30202/ 30130
¹ French Land Register data, which excludes lakes, ponds, glaciers > 1 km² (0.386 mi² or 247 acres) and river estuaries.
² Population sans doubles comptes: single count of residents of multiple communes (e.g. students and military personnel).

Pont-Saint-Esprit is a commune of southern France, in the Gard département and has a population (1999) of 9,265 (Spiripontains). The commune is situated on the Rhône River and is the site of a historical crossing, hence its name.

The Ardèche River flows into the Rhône, just to the north of the bridge.

[edit] 1951 disease

An outbreak of disease marked by acute psychotic episodes and various physical symptoms occurred in summer 1951 in Pont-Saint-Esprit, which caused more than 250 cases, 7 deaths, and 50 persons "interned" in asylums. The alimentary intoxications, which affected other parts of France but were the most serious in Pont-Saint-Esprit, were traced to "damned bread" (pain maudit). Some misidentified the mass-poisoning as ergotism (which included sensationalist popular accounts attempting to link the poisonings with LSD, of which isn't present in ergot), but the actual cause was due to consumption of seeds treated with mercury:

The mass poisoning which took place in the French town of Pont-St. Esprit in 1951 has been widely pressented in the lay and scientific press as an example of ergotism. While the poisoning was traced to bread, ergotism was not the cause of the syndrome, which was due to a toxic mercury compound used to disinfect grain to be planted as seed. Some sacks of grain treated with the fungicide were inadvertently ground into flour and baked into bread. Albert Hofmann arrived at this conclusion after visiting Pont-St. Esprit, and analyzing samples of the bread (which contained no ergot alkaloids) and autopsy samples of four of the victims who succumbed (Hofmann 1980; Hofmann 1991). On the other hand, Swedish toxicologist Bo Holmstedt insists the poisoning was in fact due to ergotism (Holmstedt 1978). An American writer published a sensationalized account of the poisoning, The Day of St. Anthony's Fire (Fuller 1968), evoking "the possibility that a strange, spontaneous form of LSD" might have been involved! Fuller was attempting to cash in on the great LSD scare—some of the poisoning victims had jumped from buildings, and this, of course, was a "known" effect of LSD! To be sure, LSD is an artificial compound, and no strain of ergot has been found which "spontaneously" produces LSD.^[1]

The city was the scene of a panic due to the mass-poisoning. Historian Steven L. Kaplan thus quoted a newspaper:

"The most incredible versions (versions abracadabrantes) are in circulation. The baker, a former candidate for the RPF [de Gaulle's party], is first accused, then his servant, then the fountains' water, then the modern machines, then foreign powers, then bacteriological war, then the devil, the SNCF, the Pope, Stalin, the Church, nationalizations."^[2]

[edit] References

^ Jonathan Ott, Pharmacotheon: Entheogenic Drugs, their Plant Sources and History (Kennewick, W.A.: Natural Products Co., 1993), pg. 145. See also Dr. Albert Hofmann, LSD: My Problem Child (New York, N.Y.: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1980), Chapter 1: "How LSD Originated," pg. 6.
.
As Dr. Simon Cotton (member of the Chemistry Department of Uppingham School, U.K.) notes, there have been numerous cases of mass-poisoning due to consumption of mercury-treated seeds:

More horrifying than this were epidemics of poisoning, caused by people eating treated seed grains. There was a serious epidemic in Iraq in 1956 and again in 1960, whilst use of seed wheat (which had been treated with a mixture of C₂H₅HgCl and C₆H₅HgOCOCH₃) for food, caused the poisoning of about 100 people in West Pakistan in 1961. Another outbreak happened in Guatemala in 1965. Most serious was the disaster in Iraq in 1971-2, when according to official figures 459 died. Grain had been treated with methyl mercury compounds as a fungicide and should have been planted. Instead it was sold for milling and made into bread. It had been dyed red as a warning and also had warning labels in English and Spanish that no one could understand.

See Simon Cotton, B.Sc., Ph.D., "Dimethylmercury and Mercury Poisoning", Molecule of the Month (MOTM; published on the School of Chemistry, University of Bristol, U.K. website), October 2003.
^ Steven L. Kaplan, "Le pain maudit de Pont-Saint-Esprit," pg. 68 of L'Histoire No. 271, December 2002, article named "Le pain, le peuple et le roi," pp. 64-70.