Sean Runnette
Author
Language
English
Description
Eating the flesh of an Egyptian mummy prevents the plague. Distilled poppies reduce melancholy. A Turkish drink called coffee increases alertness. Tobacco cures cancer. Such beliefs circulated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, an era when the term "drug" encompassed everything from herbs and spices-like nutmeg, cinnamon, and chamomile-to such deadly poisons as lead, mercury, and arsenic. In The Age of Intoxication, Benjamin Breen offers...