Kirk here. A while ago I posted about MINAMATA, the Johnny Depp movie about Eugene Smith. I don’t have anything new to report about the movie but I’d share this article about Smith. It think it’s pretty good for the most part but I noticed one problem:
“However, the disease was first discovered in 1956, after the Chisso Corporation conducted their own test and found a severe amount of heavy metals (mostly mercury) in local water bodies. "
As far as I can tell, everything after the date, 1956, in the above sentence is wrong. Here’s a much better summary of what happened in 1956 from the Wikipedia page:
“On 21 April 1956, a five-year-old girl was examined at Chisso’s factory hospital in Minamata. The physicians were puzzled by her symptoms: difficulty walking, difficulty speaking, and convulsions. Two days later, her younger sister also began to exhibit the same symptoms and she, too, was hospitalised. The girls’ mother informed doctors that her neighbour’s daughter was also experiencing similar problems. After a house-to-house investigation, eight further patients were discovered and hospitalised. On 1 May, the hospital director reported to the local public health office the discovery of an ’epidemic of an unknown disease of the central nervous system’, marking the official discovery of Minamata disease.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minamata_disease
So, the “discovery” was the first official report about there being some kind of health issue. It’s true that Chisso did its own testing and the hid the results, but that came a good deal later.
Other than that, the article is fine, as far as I can tell.
