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This phrase may be used when referring to someone who’s behaving irrationally.
The first thing most people think of when hearing this phrase is Lewis Carroll’s 1865 classic, Alice in Wonderland. In the novel, there’s a scene in which the heroine comes across a tea party in process, attended by the Hatter, the March Hare and the Dormouse. She considers the tea party “mad” because the trio are breaking all sorts of rules about Victorian etiquette and are generally behaving absurdly, in her opinion. Over time, the Hatter has become popularly known as the “Mad Hatter” although this term isn’t used in the book. It’s not much of a leap of imagination, therefore, to conclude that the phrase “mad as a hatter” is a reference to Carroll’s Mad Hatter.
The saying was, in fact, in use well before Carroll’s day, first appearing in print in an 1829 edition of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, although it’s likely older than that. It relates to people employed in the hat-making industry during the 18th and 19th centuries. At the time, hats made from animal pelts were fashionable, and workers – hatters – used mercuric nitrate in the manufacturing process. Prolonged exposure to the substance poisoned employees, who developed various physical and mental problems as a result, thus giving rise to the expression “mad as a hatter.” The state was so common among hatters that medical professionals called the syndrome “Mad Hatter Disease” (also known as erethism or mercurial erethism).
In addition to symptoms mimicking insanity, a more common indication of Mad Hatter Disease is a shaking similar to what someone afflicted with Parkinson’s Disease might experience. In the United States, the disorder was often called the “Danbury Shakes,” as Danbury, Connecticut was a hub for hat manufacturing and many people in the city exhibited this behavior.
One famous sufferer of Mad Hatter’s Disease may have been Boston Corbett, the man who killed John Wilkes Booth in 1865. A worker in the hat industry for many years, Corbett was so afflicted that he used a pair of scissors to castrate himself in 1858 (thereby curbing his libido). He eventually landed in an insane asylum in 1887.
The use of mercury in hat making was outlawed in the 1940s, and as a result this level of mercury poisoning is rare in Western countries today.
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