Was Mercury Ever Used As Medicine

By Lydia Kang Edited excerpt from Quackery. Coffins in a Bottle.

Infographic Mercury Capturing Effect Of Common Foods Food Lab Health Health And Nutrition

Modern thermometers are calibrated in standard temperature units such as Fahrenheit used in the United States or Celsius used in Canada or Kelvin used mostly by scientists.

Was mercury ever used as medicine. As head of the Indiana Ku Klux Klan David. But ever since the mercury was removed from vaccines experts and researchers have consistently found no link between the two. This product was marketed for use on minor cuts and scrapes during the 20th century.

While thermometers in the health care sector are no longer made with mercury China still produces several measurement devices such as blood-pressure meters that contain mercury. Sometimes mercury was used as part of a potion with arsenic strychnine and other poisons. The modern world is still struggling to mitigate some of the harms caused by human exposure to mercury but there was a very long period during our history when it was actually used as a magic.

4 20 Paracelsus was a physician chemist and professor of medicine at Padua University Italy in the early 16th century. Nonetheless thimerosal is no longer used in most vaccines flu shots being the chief exception. Legitimate Medicine of an Earlier Era Doctors used arsenic and mercury to treat syphilis before the introduction of penicillin in the 1940s.

However for centuries philosophers physicians and scientists used mercury for everything from medicine to clothing. In 2 nd century China the study of mercury centered on a search for an elixir of life to confer longevity or immortality. Mercurochrome was used to disinfect minor cuts and scrapes.

In a mercury or alcohol thermometer the liquid expands as it is heated and contracts when it is cooled so the length of the liquid column is longer or shorter depending on the temperature. While most people have heard that the mercury base preservative thimerosal was used in infant vaccines and continues to be used in several vaccine preparations including influenza tetanus and meningococcal vaccines most consumers have no idea that mercury is also a commonly used ingredient in other pharmaceutical products. Mercury was already being used in Western Europe to treat skin diseases.

Mercury in Medicine. The RPS museum has a tin-glazed earthenware jar with a label which reads Elecampane and mercury ointment dating from around 170030 and would have been available from apothecaries during Hogarths time. The Hogarth print depicts a shelf of apothecary ceramic jars one or two may contain mercury ointment.

It proved ideal in many ways being. My publishing house mPoer Publishing are. A recent review by a panel of prominent scientists found no evidence for the much-publicized autism link.

There some great answers here as to the history of Mercury use as a non medicine. Even today mercury is used in amalgam or silver fillings these are not actually silver at all but mercury-based. MERCURY HAS LONG BEEN USED as a medicine to treat various diseases such as syphilis and typhoid fever or parasites.

An example of the early therapeutic application of mercury of. For much of the 20th century the instrument of many murders suicides and accidental deaths could be bought at the local drugstore. The authors found that antibiotics used to treat various infections often were ineffective in the presence of abnormal localized deposits of heavy metals like Hg and Pb which were often observed to co-exist with Chlamydia trachomatis Herpes Simplex Types I II.

A Klan initiation in Tipton Indiana November 1922. It was also used to treat dental issues and. Mercury and its compounds have been used in medicine although they are much less common today than they once were now that the toxic effects of mercury and its compounds are more widely understood.

The prominent Chinese alchemist Ge Hong or Ko Hung 283 -343 CE who lived in the 4th century believed that man is what he eats and so by eating gold he could attain perfection. Unlike lead which was never used to treat schizophrenia although there was a surprising amount of lead put into medicines in the 19th century if Mercury did play a role in GPI it offers a dramatic example of Pharmacosis a distinctive and horrifying madness. This antiseptic is part of a family of products made with a base of merbromin a chemical which must be suspended in an alcohol or water solution before it can be used as an antiseptic.

One company sold heroin tablets to relieve asthma. Indian Ayurvedic herbal medicines often contained arsenic lead and mercury and it was thought the mineral elixir made from the essence of five planets could give perpetual life. Mercury was considered a cure until it killed you.

Ivermectin proved to be even more of a Wonder drug in human health improving the nutrition general health and wellbeing of billions of people worldwide ever since it was first used to treat Onchocerciasis in humans in 1988. Answer 1 of 9. Alcohol as medicine in the Middle Ages public domain European colonisation during the 15 th and 16 th centuries gave the apothecaries an abundance of exotic herbs spices barks peels and berries to add to their medicine cabinets and from this point until relatively recently a large percentage of medicines were made with an alcoholic base.

Thimerosal a mercury-containing preservative in vaccines is suspected of causing autism and other neurological disorders in children. Certainly a treatment with such a powerful medicine impressed patients and when poisoning symptoms appeared they could always be blamed on worsening of the original disease. Medical Uses of Mercury The line between alchemy and medicine was not always clear.

Through these uses they discovered many of the features of mercury perhaps most notably its toxicity. Mercury was used in scientific research largely as a result of Torricellis 1643 invention of the barometer and Fahrenheits 1720 invention of the mercury thermometer. Take a 2008 study published in Archives of General Psychiatry which.

A common form of medication in the past mercury was used as a topical treatment because of its antimicrobial properties. Luckily the medical world eventually became clued in to the extreme dangers of using mercury in and on the human body prompting the abandonment of mercury for use as an elixir. 22 2017 timer 6 min.

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