Dr. Hassall's "list of more than thirty injurious substances that he had personally discovered in food and drinks ... included 'cocculus indicus' in beer and rum, sulphate of copper in pickles, bottled fruits and preserves, lead chromate in mustard and snuff, sulphate of iron in tea and beer, copper carbonate, lead carbonate, bisulphate of mercury and various other mineral colouring matters in sugar confectionery ... here again, we may well have a cause of the chronic gastritis which was one of the commonest diseases of urban populations in the early nineteenth century" (John Burnett Plenty and Want, 1966, p. 89). Such revelations led to the passage of the first Food and Drug Act in 1860.