calomel
- n a tasteless colorless powder used medicinally as a cathartic
- One compound of mercury (calomel, mercurous chloride) is a useful purge.
- The Libman treatment: a dose of calomel, a saline purge, enemas of carbonate of soda, instillations of colon bacilli in the large bowel and bicarbonate of soda night and morning.
- Favorite drugs were "mercurials, calomel, opium, niter, Glauber's salts, Dover's powders, jalap, Peruvian barkand by the 1840s, quinine" in heroic doses.