Important: Safety Warning
This page contains a formula or preparation using substances now known to be dangerously toxic, such as arsenic, mercury, lead, or cyanide compounds. Exposure to these substances can cause severe poisoning, permanent injury, or death.
In addition, this page recommends preparations containing opium, laudanum, morphine, or similar narcotics — in some cases for children. These substances are dangerously addictive, easily fatal in overdose, and strictly controlled by law today.
In addition, this page presents medical treatment from an era before modern medicine. The remedies described are ineffective against the conditions named, and some of the ingredients or doses are harmful. Do not use them to treat any illness; consult a qualified medical professional.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
Home › Medicine › Purgative Pills
Purgative Pills
Of calomel and jalap each 10 grains; opium 1½ grain; tartar emetic a grain; oil of aniseed 1 drop. Make the whole into a mass.
To be taken at once, or divided into pills, if the patient prefer it.
Painter's Colic.
Symptoms. Pain and weight in the belly; belching; constant desire to go to stool, which is ineffectual; quick, contracted pulse; the belly becomes painful to the touch, and is drawn into knots; constant colic pains; the patient sits in a bent position: after awhile palsy of part or of the whole body.
Treatment. This disease is too apt to end in palsy, leaving the hands and limbs contracted and useless. In every case of colic, whose symptoms resemble the above, if the person has been exposed to lead in any of its shapes, all doubt on the subject vanishes.
Give laudanum in moderate doses, and rub the belly well with warm spirits, and place him in a bath as hot as he can bear. As soon as he is well dried, and has rested in bed a few minutes, take him up and dash a bucket of cold water over his belly and thighs, or mix an ounce of sulphate of magnesia in a pint of water, and give a wineglassful every half hour until ease is obtained. If this, with castor oil by the mouth and in clysters will not produce a stool, apply a large blister to the belly. As soon as the symptoms are somewhat abated, castor oil or laxative clysters may be resorted to for the purpose of keeping the bowels open, and to guard against a return small doses of opium should be taken from time to time.
Bitters, the different preparations of iron, bark, etc., are necessary to restore the strength of the system.
Worms.
Symptoms. Intolerable itching at the nose, sometimes at the fundament; disagreeable breath; grinding of the teeth and starting during sleep; hardness of the belly; gradual emaciation; colic, and sometimes convulsions.
Treatment. This will vary according to the kind of worm that is to be destroyed. They are of three kinds:
The White Thread-Worm Resembles a small piece of white thread, and is usually found near the fundament, at the lower end of the guts, where it produces a contraction of the parts, and a most intolerable itching. Clysters of lime-water will frequently bring the whole nest of them away, and procure instant relief.
The tincture of aloes below, however, is one of the best remedies known for not only this, but the round worm.