The Principles of Therapeutics Author:Oliver Thomas Osborne Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: that not always does sweetness make a bad tasting drug taste less disagreeable. Many a more or less nauseating drug is much better tolerated by dissolving it in ... more »a sour mixture, as in syrup of citric acid and water. Also, a drug dissolved in simple water may be added to fresh lemonade or orangeade. Peppermint has a very pleasant taste for most people, and as disagreeable a drug as potassium chlorate when used as a gargle, may be well dissolved in peppermint water. Effervescing water, either simple carbonated, or better an alkaline water as vichy, is a pleasant method of administering many drugs, even insoluble powders; the powder is suspended, as bismuth for instance, by the air globules. An oil like castor oil, or cod liver oil, may be disguised by placing a little salt in the bottom of a wineglass, then filling the glass half full with cold water without stirring to dissolve the salt, and then placing the oil carefully on top of the water. If this mixture is rapidly swallowed the only taste is that of the salt. Castor oil is variously disguised by the addition of a small amount of saccharin and a little oil of anise or oil of wintergreen, and may then be given in orangeade. Or, it may be further disguised by adding fluid extract of licorice. The disagreeable taste of epsom salt may also be disguised by a little saccharin and oil of peppermint or wintergreen. A pleasant method of administering many disagreeable drugs to children is to give them in a teaspoonful or tablespoonful of freshly made cocoa or chocolate. Or, a little sweetened chocolate may be crushed by the mother and given with the powder or solution. Evolution Of A Prescription While it is advised to write prescriptions as far as possible in English, it is also advised to use a few Latin abbreviations...« less