Introduction - Uppsala Monitoring Centre

apid emaciation. The treatment for the ‘mercurial disease’ was
opium.
Henbane: ‘Possesses the power of producing haemorrhage,
especially bleeding of the nose. In large doses it produces:
suspicious, quarrelsome, spitefully-calumnious, revengeful,
destructive, fearless mania. Also difficulty of moving, and insensibility
of the limbs, and apoplectic symptoms… convulsions, want of
memory, sleeplessness, dry cough, dryness of the mouth and nose,
flow of mucus from the nose, and from the flow of saliva..
convulsions in the facial and ocular muscles… vertigo, and a dull
pain in the membranes lying under the skull.’
Hellebore Album: ‘That most incomparable remedy’. It causes:
‘inflammation and swelling of the skin of the face, sometimes (from
larger doses) the whole body, heat of the whole body, burning in
different external parts, cutaneous eruptions, constriction of the
gullet, larynx and a sense of suffocation, rigidity of the tongue with
tough mucus in the mouth, constriction of the chest, pleuritic
symptoms, cramp in the calve, an anxious sensation in the stomach,
nausea, gripes, and cutting pains here and there in the bowels, great
anxiety, vertigo, headache (confusion of the head), violent thirst,
tremblings, stammering, convulsions of the eyes, hiccough,
sneezing, vomiting, painful, scanty evacuations with tenesmus, local,
or (from larger doses) general convulsions, cold sweats, watery
diuresis, ptyalism, expectoration, general coldness, marked
weakness, fainting, long profound sleep’...
1797 ‘Mercury stark naked’: a series of letters addressed to Dr Beddoes,
stripping that poisonous mineral of its medical pretensions by Isaac
Swainson. ‘Spasms, loss of sight, hearing, taste and smelling;
acceleration of the pulse, prostration of strength, giddiness of the
head with swooning, bleeding at the nose, increase of salivation,
pain and swelling of maxillary glands, brassy taste in the saliva,
stubborn costive habits, aching head, throbbing in the temple
arteries, eyes hot and reddened, cholic, attended with palsy of a limb
or general palsy.’ This was followed by an advertisement for Velnos’
vegetable syrup. This damnation of mercury seems to be a prelude
to his advertising his own remedy (Swainson, 1797). [Velno’s
Original Vegetable Syrup contained sublimate mercury alongside the
more benign ingredients of gum arabic, honey and syrup].
1798 ‘Observations and experiments on the broad-leaved willow bark’ by
William White. Bath: printed and sold by S. Hazard; sold also by