Word: nostrums
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...their only important enemy. Passenger pigeons were good to eat, fun for sport shooting, and almost entirely salable: their dried gizzards were thought to cure gallstones; their powdered stomachs were a nostrum for dysentery; and their feathers were in great demand for use as ticking. During the 1870s, when the slaughter reached its peak, hard-working hunters could net 15,000 birds in a single day-at a market value of $1,250. News of a nesting was spread by telegraph; hunters came from miles around, and the pigeons were trapped, bludgeoned or shot (a single shotgun blast once brought...
...American economy moving again, Myrdal offers a familiar nostrum: the coordination of greater public spending with more long-range economic forecasting. But this, Myrdal insists, does not mean more federal controls over the economy. In fact, he feels that there is already far too much federal intervention in the day-to-day working of the American economy...
...Cunningham, 80, Viscount of Hyndhope, a crusty, klaxon-voiced sea dog who as Britain's Mediterranean commander in chief in World War II sank the pride of the Italian navy at Taranto and Cape Matapan, blocking Rommel's supply route and turning Mussolini's vaunted Mare Nostrum into "Cunningham's Pond"; of a heart attack; in London...
...maiden aunt of mine keeps insisting that people mellow when they enter middle-age. I have always thought this nostrum a trifle pat, and Ingmar Bergman (doubtless intending no malice to my aunt) turns her theory inside out with Secrets of Women, an unpretentious early work that precedes by some years the tempestuous and difficult films by which he is better known. For Bergman, the mellowness of maturity seems to have come before youth's probing restlessness...
Federal control, beginning with the Food and Drug Act of 1906, gradually cut down the nostrum peddlers' bombast. Labeling requirements forced Lydia Pinkham's heirs to note that her vegetable compound for "falling of the womb and other female weaknesses" contained "18% of alcohol," but they piously insisted that it was there "solely as a solvent and preservative." Parker's "True Tonic" for "in ebriates" gave its victims a hair of the dog with 41.6% alcohol (83 proof...