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The British School
Published in Scott M. Jackson, Skin Disease and the History of Dermatology, 2023
Bateman struggled with poor health for the last five years of his life. In 1818, he experienced mercurial erethism (neurotoxicity) after treatment for failing sight in one eye, and he died a few years later from an epidemic fever he presumably caught at the London Fever Hospital.54 Bateman's life was even shorter than Willan's and ended at 42 years of age in 1821. Bateman's contemporary biographer, Rumsey, wrote: He was a sound scholar and an accomplished physician, wanting nothing to adorn and complete the character proper to his rank. He loved learning for its own sake. Science was to him as his daily food; and the exercise of his art, whether in private or in public, was in the strictest sense professional, so as to exhibit altogether, with such qualifications, a character of great value in itself, and much interest to all who have the good of the medical professional at heart.55
Mercuric chloride and syphilis
Published in Dinesh Kumar Jain, Homeopathy, 2022
“The metal acts in extremely low concentration if allowed sufficient time. Mercuric chloride kills B. Typhosus at dilution of 1 in 1000000 in 24 hours and at a dilution of 1 in 20000 in 22 minutes” (Wilson et al., 1975, p. 550). “Mercury was the first drug effective in treatment of syphilis” (Wilson et al., 1975, p. 234). “Like other mercury salts mercuric chloride has a specific toxic action against Treponema pallidum and has been used in treatment of syphilis” (Wilson et al., 1975, p. 234). Mercury is highly toxic to the body, 1–5 μg/ml concentration of mercury in blood produces various toxic manifestations. Acute mercury poisoning is characterized by ashen gray appearance of the mouth, pharynx, and gastric mucosa, vomiting, diarrhea, emphysema, hemorrhage. Kidney, colon, and month are also affected. Renal lesions are also produced. In chronic mercury poisoning, features are paresthesias, ataxia, visual defects, dysarthria, hearing defects, tremors, and various neurological and psychiatric symptoms. Irritability, erethism, insomnia, confusion, and forgetfulness are common psychiatric symptoms of chronic mercury poisoning. Nephrotoxicity, gingivitis, stomatitis, and other nonspecific symptoms such as anorexia, weight loss, anemia, and weakness are also associated with chronic mercury poisoning (Klaassen, 1980, pp. 1623–1625).
The quest for wellness: Public health and environmental concerns
Published in Lois N. Magner, Oliver J. Kim, A History of Medicine, 2017
During World War I, Hamilton conducted studies of war-related industries, especially factories making munitions and explosives, to establish rules for protecting workers. American factories, with little or no experience, were producing huge quantities of chemicals needed for weapons and explosives, such as dinitrobenzol, trinitrotoluol, military guncotton, fulminate of mercury, nitric acid, aniline, and rubber. Previously, America had imported many of these chemicals from Germany. In 1923, Hamilton began to study factories that produced and used mercury, one of the oldest industrial poisons. During World War I there was great demand for mercury fulminate for the detonators of high explosives. Miners were poisoned because of their exposure to mercury fumes and dust particles. Their wives were poisoned by washing clothes that were heavily contaminated with mercury. Symptoms of mercury poisoning include swelling and pain in the gums and lips, twitching limbs, tremors of the hands, fatigue, anxiety, depression, irritability, and a neurological disorder known as Mad Hatter Disease (erethism mercurialis).
Affective Ankylosis and the Body in Fanon and Capécia
Published in Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 2018
Surprisingly, Fanon concludes his analysis of I Am a Martinican Woman by diagnosing Capécia’s interracial desire not as riven by stasis, but as constituting a case of affective erethism, described as “a bilateral process, an attempt to acquire—by internalizing them—assets that were originally prohibited” (Fanon, 2008, p. 42). One is struck by the variance, as “erethism” connotes sexual agitation, irritation, and stimulation—in other words, the antithesis of petrification. Here we need to add some nuance to Fanon’s description, for the originally prohibited asset to which he refers is a being that colonization does not just bar, but that it renders impossible through the negation of blackness that institutes, and therefore does not appear in, the desire coursed through the symbolic law lived by the subject. Instead of externally opposing it, the affective erethism is the neurotic’s bid to reverse this imaginary deprivation of being by, for instance, insisting on exclusively marrying white men, which has “a compulsive quality that makes it so like the behavior of the phobic” (Fanon, 2008, p. 35). The compulsion to internalize the “assets” that stand in for being — the hope, in this case, that the possession of André’s white love has the power to “lactify” her non-being — will always fail because colonization makes blackness an impossible site of embodiment.