Word: laudanum
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...History's most talkative addict was Thomas De Quincey (The Confessions of an English Opium Eater), who took laudanum (like morphine, derived from opium). He yielded to the habit four times in 40 years, finally cured himself by tapering off, the most painful cure...
Drugstore Demon. Harold's first job was in an Altoona drugstore, where he one day "dispensed laudanum for paregoric," nearly died from the fright of his mistake. In 1890 he shifted to his uncle's drugstore in Chicago and saw a new world he despised. "The 'filthy rich' drove behind high-stepping horses drawing ornate equipages from which tall-hatted coachmen and footmen surveyed their surroundings with a truly devastating scorn." For three years Harold Ickes glared at "the intangible ingredients out of which a careful architect was to build a robust curmudgeonly character." He learned...
...into a clearing in a "new, strange wood." There he saw "beautiful bright-plumaged roosters ... as tall as houses . . . their legs . . . like the pillars of cathedral aisles." William's only happiness was "escape into that other dreamworld" until in a moralistic moment Grandfather Seabrook smashed Grandmother's laudanum bottle. It was too late to smash the hypnotic effects of her drugged mind on young William...
...broadcast his famed principle of homeopathy (Greek, homoios, like, and pathos, disease): Similia similibus curentur. (Like should be cured by like.) In Hahnemann's day, doctors used remedies which were often more painful, some times more harmful, than the disease itself: drastic bloodletting for fevers, enormous doses of laudanum, heroic purges of calomel, ipecac. Hahnemann believed that minuscule doses were more powerful than heavy ones. Because of this revolutionary practice, and because he was bad for apothecaries' business, Hahnemann was hounded out of a half-dozen German towns...
...think he saw my feelings." Gradually Caroline replaced literature with laudanum and brandy. Sometimes she broke $1,000 worth of china in a morning...