Introduction - Uppsala Monitoring Centre

disease of the remedy’, a forerunner of pharmacovigilance (see table
at end of the book).
1811 Hahnemann’s thesis ‘Medical historical dissertation on the Hellebore
veterum of the ancients’ gave the uses as: chronic and hemicranial
headache, mania, melancholy, dropsy without fever, epilepsy,
paralysis, longstanding gout, diseases of joints, inflammation of the
liver, chronic jaundice and odd affections of the trachea.
The ADR of Hellebore album were: vomiting, suffocation, face
swells, tongue protrudes, face excessively red, the voice goes,
delirium, hiccough, cramps (calves, hands and muscles of
mastication), excess weakness, pulse almost extinct, thirst, syncope,
loss of consciousness, loss of vision, stammering, mind deranged,
precordial burning, profuse sweat and sneezing. These are fewer
than he gives in his provings.
A famous English physician, John Coakley Lettsome, (1744–
1815) founded the London Medical Society in 1773. He was the butt
of a poem:
‘Whatever patients come to I
I physics, bleeds and sweats ‘em
If after that they choose to die
What’s that to me, I Lettsom.’
Expelling bad humours still remained a strong philosophy.
1813 ‘De l’influence de l’émétique sur l’homme et les animaux’; mémoire lu
à la première classe de l’Institut de France, le 23 août 1813 et suivi
du rapport fait à la classe (Lecture given by F Magendie) par MM.
Cuvier, Humboldt Pinel et Percy Paris : Crochard, 1813. [The
influence of the emetic on man and the animals; dissertation read to
the first class at the Institute of France the 23 rd August 1813 and
followed with an account made to the class].
Antimony given in large doses: ‘enormous evacuations both up
and down with atrocious pain, convulsions, dyspnoea, haemorrhage,
swelling of the lower abdomen, inflammation, erosion and gangrene
of the stomach and the intestines and which finishes by death
…Devouring heat and wrenching in the region of the epigastrium,
switching from syncope to convulsive agitation followed closely by
violent vomiting of frothy yellow matter and sometimes mixed with
streaks of blood… frequent fainting fits and painful cramps in the
legs.’
1814 ‘Treatise on Gonorrhoea virus and Lues Veneris’ by Benjamin Bell
first reported ‘eczema mercuriale as well as purgation, nausea and