Volume 1

Professional anecdotes, or ana of medical literature.

Date:
1825
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Professional anecdotes, or ana of medical literature. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    by the belief in ghosts, and in other delusions of former days, carried the visionary terrors to excess; indeed, so far, as to render the matter truly ridiculous, in a book, which he published, with the epigraph of 4 Death in the Pot: Poisoned beer afforded Mr. Accum an excel- lent opportunity to exercise his talent in the manufacture of books. Here the author obliges his reader to doze over long lists of brew- ers, who have been convicted of the dire crime of having hartshorn shavings, Spanish liquorice, caraway seeds, and such like 'poisonous sub- stances, in their possession. The only sus- picious articles which we can discover in these dreadful tales of empoisoning of beer, are, coculus Indicus and nux vomica; but the author carefully avoids any mention of the medicinal power of these active fruits; the lat- ter of which is, as is well known to physicians, one of the most powerful remedies we possess in paralytic and similar affection; and may not a small quantity of the drugs, at the same time that they increase the apparent strength of the beer, render it more wholesome, at least to some persons, than when they are omitted? It ap- pears, from our old historians of London, that all the windows of the great outlets of the town were formerly occupied by rows of bedridden