Introduction - Uppsala Monitoring Centre

Opium: ‘headache, nausea and vomiting, tremor, secretions
diminished, peristalsis lessened, stertorous respiration, dark suffused
countenance, slow labouring pulse, cold extremities, restlessness,
delirium, and itching’.
Henbane: ‘sense of heat in the throat, sleep, vertigo, pain in the
head, dilated pupils, occasionally diaphoresis, or diuresis, pustular
eruption, often laxative. Overdose–disordered vision, loss of speech,
difficult deglutition, delirium, intoxication, stupor, some times tonic
spasms, convulsions, paralysis, pain in bowels, diarrhoea,
feebleness of pulse, petechiae, and death’.
Hellebore Niger: ‘vomiting, hypercatharsis, vertigo, cramps,
convulsions, and death’.
Hellebore Album: ‘vomiting, hypercatharsis with bloody stools,
general prostration, and sneezing’.
Hellebore Viridis: ‘vomiting, faintness, somnolence, vertigo,
headache, dimness of vision, dilated pupils, and bradycardia’.
The different species seem to produce different symptoms, but this
is not borne out by subsequent books.
Mercury: ‘small frequent pulse, anxiety about the praecordia, pale,
nervous agitation, debility, eruption, salivation, coppery taste, sore
gums, foetor, and tongue swelling’.
This was the first dispensatory that dealt with adverse effects of
the drugs.
1860 First clinical description of mercurialism in hatters was published in
the transactions of the Medical Society of New Jersey in 1860. The
exposed workers complained of ‘the shakes’, tremor, gastrointestinal
disturbances, sore mouth, psychic disturbances such as irritability,
timidity, irascibility and difficulty in getting along with people,
headaches, drowsiness, insomnia, weakness, loss of coordination,
slurred speech, loosening of teeth, memory loss, depression,
irritability and anxiety’. (O’Carroll et al., 1995).
‘On the injurious effects of mercury in the treatment of disease’ by S
O Habershon, 1860: ‘salivation, taste, breath, gums, diarrhoea,
nutrition impaired, effusions into cavities, vomiting, cough, coma,
convulsions, mercurial fever, tremor, dry skin, loss of memory,
sleeplessness, delirium, mercurial cachexia, deficient in red cells,
pulse irritable, palpitations, swelling ankles, anasarca, erythema and
death’. At the end of the book is an advertisement for his own recipe,
so not all these books are for enlightenment but some were to sell
their own products.