Happy Birthday, wesha!

[the_gneech]

For your present, here's today's Forgotten English!

ustion
The act of burning; the state of being burnt; [from] Latin ustus, to burn. [Related to] ustorious, having the quality of burning.

--Rev. John Boag's Imperial Lexicon, c. 1850

Feast Day of St. Alexander,
a third-century patron of charcoal burners. George Wood's Vitalogy: Food Remedies for All Diseases (1896) described some medical uses of charcoal: "In many cases of headache, two teaspoonfuls of pulverized charcoal, in half a teacup of milk, will effectually relieve the patient. ... In cases of costiveness, many persons are cured by taking a tablespoon three times a day. It is of great utility in arresting mortification of the bowels, taken in large doses. ... It will usually regulate foul breath. Dose, from one to three teaspoonfuls, one to three times a day; in urgent cases, it may be used every two or three hours. ... Mixed with corn-meal and wet with a strong ooze of oak-bark, it is a good application to parts in a state of gangrene or mortification. Charcoal prepared from the young shoots of willow is preferable for most medical purposes. This preparation can now be found in all drug stores."

Warning: 19th-century medicine has been found to be harmful or fatal if swallowed.

-The Gneech

Comments

[packbat.livejournal.com]

Warning: 19th-century medicine has been found to be harmful or fatal if swallowed.

I think that's why homeopathy became so popular in the first place – since it didn't do anything, it was better medicine than its contemporaries. ;)

[galadrion.livejournal.com]

Hm. The willow-shoot charcoal remedy, though, is actually one of the more effective treatments from that time. Willow is a natural source of asperin's active ingredient (and turning it into charcoal wouldn't remove all of that - though you'd get less out of it than you would by making willow-bark tea), and charcoal isn't, in and of itself, hazardous. Indeed, because of its action as a filtration agent, charcoal can be used for the purposes stated as long as it's not prepared from a base with toxic compounds - it'll absorb several of the agents which commonly cause indigestion, acid reflux, or other distresses under the heading of "mortification of the bowels".

I'm fairly certain, however, that charcoal won't do anything for gangrene unless it's actually applied during the charring process. And that's a rather drastic and haphazard "cure" - these days, I'd rather trust a competent scalpel-wielder.