Word: calomel
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...services at Stillman beyond a certain short stay (which is covered by the $15 semester medical fee) and the expense of all medicinals used by the patient while on out-patient treatment. Unlike many colleges, Harvard has no pharmacy and must rely on commercial apothecaries for calomel and cough medicine...
...Fowler, who tried to make ends meet by selling Egg Wonder Powder, a baking preparation, and Eureka pants-hangers. He also had a grandfather, an old prospector who still hoped to strike it rich in the Colorado hills and spent much of his free time dosing himself with quinine, calomel and the secret remedies of one Gun Wa, a Chinese doctor. Most important of all, Gene had a grandmother, a pious, masterful woman whose hair had once been admired by General Lew Wallace...
Favorite drugs were "mercurials, calomel, opium, niter, Glauber's salts, Dover's powders, jalap, Peruvian bark-and by the 1840s, quinine" in heroic doses. One doctor reported a patient who took so much calomel that his teeth fell out, then the upper and lower jawbones came out "in the form of horse shoes." One treatment for the ague involved putting the patient in a draft between two cabins, stripping off his clothes, pouring cold water over him until he had a "pretty powerful smart chance of a shake...
...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...
...reason is quicksilver's war price. Even in peacetime, 15% of world production goes into fulminate for explosives. Another war use: calomel for soldiers' bowels, ointments for their skins. Last summer, up from a 1932 low of $46 a flask, the price of quicksilver was idling between $83 and $91, just below the price most U. S. mines need for profitable production. When war broke out, it shot up to $147, by February had reached $185, has stayed near there since. Warring governments have clamped the lid on news of their needs and reserve supplies. Panicky...