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Middlemarch vocabulary
5 drugs or drug ingredient vocabulary words
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strychnine
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synonyms: ~nux vomica ???
tags: [Rx]
► definition
Definition:a very toxic poison that is still used for killing rodents. Ingestion causes muscle convulsions and eventually death.For some reason the first of these symptoms was once thought of as a positive thing, so small doses were used as a performance enhancing drug (!?!!) yes, people actually voluntarily and knowingly swallowed doses of this...
► uses
Uses:
After a time I crawled home, took some food and a strong dose of strychnine, and went to sleep in my clothes on my unmade bed. Strychnine is a grand tonic, Kemp, to take the flabbiness out of a man."
"It's the devil," said Kemp. "It's the palaeolithic in a bottle."
"I awoke vastly invigorated and rather irritable. You know?"
"I know the stuff."
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"Who is often almost as ignorant as the coroner himself," said Lydgate. "Questions of medical jurisprudence ought not to be left to the chance of decent knowledge in a medical witness, and the coroner ought not to be a man who will believe that strychnine will destroy the coats of the stomach if an ignorant practitioner happens to tell him so."
George Eliot. Middlemarch
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