NP Re: propaganda

[argus.]

davemarc sez:
> 19th century medications are a story in themselves.  I don't think they're
> simply a matter of marketing.  I know I've been harping on O'Neill
> recently, so I'll stay on the subject a little longer to point out that
> Eugene's mom became addicted to morphine after being treated with it
> following a painful birth experience in the late part of the century.  The
> doctor wasn't great, but I don't think he was a complete incompetent
> either; such usages were as common as they were regrettable.  Considering
> that the "safe" anesthesia pioneered c.1864 wasn't all that safe (and still
> isn't, in some ways), and that addictive substances like alcohol and
> codeine are still in cough medicines, the origins of "Mother's Little
> Helper" might have been less sinister, and more primitive and desperate,
> than suggested.  Now if we're gonna talk about modern-day cigarettes and
> heroin and cocaine....
<cut>

Mary Poovey does a nice chapter of her book _Uneven Developments: The
Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England_(U Chicago:1988) on 
the chloroform debates starting after 1847 when it was discovered.  She 
notes the 123 reported fatalities by 1863 from chloroform, as well the 
controversy chloroform caused, mainly because male doctors were 
interpreting the state of stupor and incoherence in women as heightened
sexuality (while of course the men going under were described as 
"fighting").

Two pynchonian stories within: one, of the discovers waking up from
trying the potion they had been experimenting with, laid out cold on
the floor, beneath a chair and one of the three's "feet and legs,
making valorous efforts to overturn the supper table, or more 
probably to annihilate everything that was on it" and also something
about a demo to an academic group in which the guinea pig was killed,
to the horror of the attendees.

take care all
susan