Chemistry

Absolutely! From what I understand elemental mercury is pretty much harmless. You can swallow it and poop it out. But, if you heat it and breathe the vapors. It is evil stuff.

If you haven’t listened to that S-Town podcast. It’s pretty good. It’s about a guy from Alabama that was believed to have a genius IQ. He was kind of famous amoung people who collected really old clocks. Well, there are these really old clocks that were gilded by painting them with a gold mercury amalgam. Then you burn the mercury off leaving the gold. He even did that service for people.

Anyway, that’s just part of the story, but it’s kind of believed that he was so weird because of mercury.

Edit: He was famous for fixing really old clocks because sometimes they were missing parts and he could make the missing parts and make them work like when they were new. But he also gilded clocks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ormolu