Introduction - Uppsala Monitoring Centre

hiccoughs*; convulsions; syncopes, leipothimies 143 and faintings;
death*, tho’ very rarely, and that in very weak people; purging; a long
stay thereof at stomach sometimes; stoppage of urine*; It sometimes
proves dangerous after haemorrhages and large evacuations.’
Thomas Bayes published ‘An Essay towards solving a problem in
the doctrine of chances’. This has become the gold standard for the
assessment of causality of adverse drug events (Bayes, 1763).
1765 Samuel Bard (1742–1821), experimented on himself taking 1½
grains of opium and checked his pulse every half to one hour and
found that the rate had dropped from 71 per minute to 57 per minute,
starting about an hour after taking the drug and the effect wore off
about 7 hours later. He repeated the experiment on himself three
times and then on three friends and six patients (Maehle, 1999).
Fabre recommended much circumspection in the use of mercury,
because of fear of ‘accidents orageux’: swelling of the tongue,
engorgement of the salivary glands, swelling of the head, dysentery,
fever, delirium and convulsions (Fabre, 1765).
‘Ben Cao Gang Mu Shi’ [Supplements to compendium of materia
medica] by Zhao Xue-Min. It lists 716 medical substances.
‘Cowpox and Its Ability to Prevent Smallpox’ by Jon Fewster, an
apothecary of Thornbury, was submitted to the Medical Society of
London, but was not published (FPH RCP, 2000).
1768 William Watson (1717–1787) in ‘An account of experiments,
instituted with a view of ascertaining the most successful method of
inoculating the smallpox’ London: J Nourse. He compared the pretreatment
of children inoculated against smallpox. He made three
groups as similar as possible and he measured the number of
pustules or pocks and compared the means. It was not known at that
time how to take into account the small number with very high pock
count. The three groups were: mercury, senna plus rose syrup and
no pre-treatment. One mercury patient had more pocks that the rest
of the group together. This is one of the earliest studies using an
untreated control group and a quantification of the results. However
the largest group only contained 11 patients and it wasn’t until much
larger groups were used that there was a chance of picking up type
‘B’ reactions 144 (Bolyston, 2008).
143 Leipothymie = lipothymy = sensation of being about to faint
144 Type ‘B’ reaction = hypersensitivity or idiosyncratic reaction (Rawlins & Thompson, 1977)