preview

Dr. Rush Research Paper

Decent Essays

ush made patients ingest the solution until they drooled, and often people’s teeth and hair fell out after weeks or months of continuous treatment. His “cure” no doubt poisoned or outright killed swaths of people whom yellow fever might have spared. Even so, having perfected his treatment in Philadelphia, ten years later he sent Meriwether and William off with some prepackaged samples. As a handy side effect, Dr. Rush’s pills have enabled modern archaeologists to track down campsites used by the explorers. With the weird food and questionable water they encountered in the wild, someone in their party was always queasy, and to this day, mercury deposits dot the soil many places where the gang dug a latrine, perhaps after one of Dr. Rush’s “Thunderclappers” had worked a little too well. Mercury also came up in science class. When first presented with the jumble of the periodic table, I scanned for mercury and couldn’t find it. It is there—between gold, which is also dense and soft, and thallium, which is also poisonous. But …show more content…

Hat manufacturers once used a bright orange mercury wash to separate fur from pelts, and the common hatters who dredged around in the steamy vats, like the mad one in Alice in Wonderland, gradually lost their hair and wits. Eventually, I realized how poisonous mercury is. That explained why Dr. Rush’s Bilious Pills purged the bowels so well: the body will rid itself of any poison, mercury included. And as toxic as swallowing mercury is, its fumes are worse. They fray the “wires” in the central nervous system and burn holes in the brain, much as advanced Alzheimer’s disease does. But the more I learned about the dangers of mercury, the more—like William Blake’s “Tyger! Tyger! burning bright”—its destructive beauty attracted me. Over the years, my parents redecorated their kitchen and took down the shelf with the mug and teddy bear, but they kept the knickknacks together in a cardboard box. On a

Get Access