My uncle was a dentist.  Growing up as a child in the 50's, I played with
"quicksilver" often, rolling it in my hands, as did my brother and cousins.
I also had mercury fillings every time I got a cavity.  Fast forward 40
years....is it any suprise that I tested high in mercury content, had all my
mercury fillings replaced, and because of the high mercury content in many
fish, limit my intake as to amount and type?  Did my uncle mean to cause me
harm?  An unequivocal NO.  Did he?  I believe so.

Susan


>  One of the common
> remedies of the 18th and 19th centuries was mercury.  Mercury is well known
> today to be a toxic heavy metal, the very vapors of which are dangerous.
> Any junior high science teacher knows this, and has in her lab classroom a
> mercury clean-up kit, for immediate, safe isolation of any spill, no matter
> how small.  No longer will my grade-school friends and I be allowed to play
> with "quicksilver," mercury's common name.  No longer may anyone roll the
> heavy, cold, shiny liquid about in their hands and try to coat pennies with
> it.  It is too dangerous.
> ...
>
> Yet in the not too far past, mercury, often as the drug calomel, was
> administered to countless innocent and trusting patients, not by Mesmer or
> any other oddball, but by the family doctor.  Well, we can dismiss the dark
> ages of medicine as over and done with, right?  Wrong.  Mercury, making up
> over half of a so-called "silver" amalgam dental filling, is still placed
> into the living bone tissue of adults and children, where it may well stay,
> 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for ten years of more.  Some of my mercury
> amalgam fillings lasted me from childhood into fatherhood.  If a science
> teacher encouraged a 13 year old put mercury into his mouth, it would be
> gross negligence, bordering on criminal.  Dentists do it every day.
>