Keyser's Pills were an 18th-century patent medicine containing mercuric oxide and acetic acid used to treat syphilis.

Mercury was a common, long-standing treatment for syphilis. Keyser's pills were marketed by and named for Jean Keyser, a surgeon in the French military.[1] They were a standard treatment in the French military by the 1750s.[2] Keyser's solution of mercury mixed with acetic acid was intended to reduce the side-effects of mercury treatments, but still proved quite dangerous. A trial of four women at Bicêtre Hospital caused colic, diarrhea, fevers, nausea and vomiting, and mouth ulcers to the level of gangrene. One subject miscarried.[2]

A clinical trial of the pills was performed in Geneva in 1761 and deemed successful, which led the pills to be a considered a good treatment for some time, though not without continuing controversy and debate.[1][3][4] English physician John Pringe cautioned biographer James Boswell against taking the pills, as well as Kennedy's Lisbon Diet Drink, for his venereal disease.[5] Simon-Nicholas Henri Linguet's French novel La Cacomonade also referenced the "dragées de Keyser".[6]

The pills were also marketed in the American colonies in the 1760s and 1770s.[7]

See also

References

  1. 1 2 Louis-Courvoisier M (2007)An 18th century controlled trial prompted by a potential shortage of hospital beds., JLL Bulletin: Commentaries on the history of treatment evaluation
  2. 1 2 Conner, Susan P. The Pox in Eighteenth-Century France, in The Secret Malady: Venereal Disease in Eighteenth-century Britain and France, p. 25
  3. ↑ (1 September 1834). The Vienna or Dutch Pills, Botanic Watchman (Albany, New York), p. 144
  4. ↑ Art. 26, The Monthly Review, p. 163 (1766).
  5. ↑ The Oxford Illustrated Companion to Medicine, p. 628 (3d ed. 2001)
  6. ↑ Fournier. Treatment of Syphllis, International Medical Magazine (March 1892)
  7. ↑ Breen, T.H. The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (2004)


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