Introduction - Uppsala Monitoring Centre

spasms of the ocular muscles, blindness, cold sweating, mental
disturbance, stupor, convulsions, and severe coryza when snuffed
up through the nostrils’.
Green Hellebore: ‘nausea and vomiting, watery diarrhoea, slow
pulse, dilatation of the pupils, cold sweats, failure of sight, coma,
sneezing, muscular weakness, reduced temperature, slow shallow or
stertorous breathing, sleepiness, dizziness, faintness, increased
kidney, lung and liver secretion, and fatal.’ Again one wonders
whether these are true differences between the different types of
hellebore’.
Salicylic Acid: ‘tinnitus, deafness, pain in forehead, manual
tremors, excess debility, hurried respiration, lesions of the kidneys,
tingling in the extremities, delirium, amaurosis, dimness of vision,
ptosis, strabismus, asphyxia, nausea and vomiting, pyrosis,
diarrhoea, angina, redness of face, burning mouth, and increased
saliva’.
Diacetylmorphine (heroin) was synthesized in Germany. It was
widely lauded as a ‘safe preparation free from addiction-forming
properties’.
First US National Pure Food and Drug Congress. Anxiety about the
adulteration of foods had been growing since the 1848 bill and the
drug regulations came in on the back of the food regulations.
Johannes Andreas Fibiger performed the first randomised controlled
trial comparing patients with diphtheria who were randomised
according to their day of hospital admission to either standard
treatment or standard treatment plus serum treatment. Serum
sickness affected approximately 60 % of the serum treated patients
(Hróbjartsson et al., 1998).
1899 Acetyl salicylic acid marketed as ‘Aspirin’ by Farbenfabriken vormals
Friedrich Bayer & Co. The sodium salt of Aspirin and sodium
salicylate were tested on normal rabbits and on cold-blooded
animals, which ‘showed clearly that Aspirin is less poisonous than
salicylic acid’. The clinician, Floeckinger, even went so far as to take
two large doses of Aspirin himself: first 75 grains (4.86 G) and then
another 60 grains (3.9 G). After the first dose he found himself
‘without toxic effects, except violent headache and tinnitus’ which
lasted for 16 hours, until it subsided following profuse sweats. After
the second dose, Floeckinger experienced ‘increased pulse, reduced
temperature, and flashes of light before the eyes’. Nonetheless,
Floeckinger concludes his article as follows: