Word: 1840s
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
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...
...early 19th Century, shortly after chemists discovered ether and nitrous oxide (laughing gas), some medical students went on jags, taking a few whiffs of one drug or the other until half-conscious and happily drunk. In the early 1840s,'dashing young Dr. Long sniffed ether at parties, but was clear-headed enough to notice that his drunken friends, if they came to blows, felt no pain. So one day in 1842, he fearfully soaked a towel in ether, anesthetized a friend before removing a tumor...