WHAT'S IN A PILL?
Rex Burress
When I see a robin, or a cedar waxwing, swallow a pyracantha berry, I think of a person swallowing a pill. Yet, that bird knows what it's getting, which is not always the case with human pill swallowers.
Not only human mistakes are possible in the preparation, but there is the possibility of inferior ingredients being used, or sometimes a harmful substance being included by some fiend [The Tylenol incident]. “Faith is taking a pill!”
Any food or medication processing can be sabotaged. Peas can be put into a peppermint pill! In a recent survey, 50% of retail honey was said to be diluted with other syrups. More jobs should be generated toward quality control, but who pays for it?
Nevertheless, we have largely become a pill-swallowing society, especially in the doctor/prescription/pharmaceutical sense, as well as over the counter aspirin-type medicines. Medication in the form of a pill seems to be the first line of defense in disease treatment. Most seniors have pills for this and that, and I have been well-supplied.
I am reminded of a senior relative who lived in Kansas City when I was a boy. He was what was called a “dope-fiend” in those days, and my Dad and Uncle Frank went down to get him to live in Trenton, MO. They tried to hide Hinckly's pills, but he would rebel, declaring that you had “to take this to get the benefit of that!” Could they have been vitamins?
There's something for everything, all the way back to the snake-oil salesman...and even beyond, since history reveals “Terra Sigillata” red clay of that Mediterranean region in 500 B.C., contained absorbent iron, silica, chalk and magnesium, and was rolled into round balls and sold as 'divine healing' pills, popular in Europe through the 19th Century. Rolled gobs of honey and myrrh pills, may have been made in 4000 B.C. There aren't many round pills made now, but I think of “Carter's Little Liver Pills” that were round laxative pills in the 1940's.
Pills were found in a 140 B.C. Roman shipwreck, and they were a form of “vegetable pills,” as DNA probes indicated two dozen nutritious plants such as carrot, celery, cabbage, yarrow, and hibiscus were powdered into the pills. This may have been the beginning of the vitamin-thought that indeed evolved into 'a pill for this and a pill for that!' Like Ponce deLeon's search for the fountain of youth, there seems to be a modern search for the magic pill. Take a look at CVS's burdened pill-shelves.
After certain plants were found to have sedative effects, especially opium, cocaine, morphine, and heroin, distribution often involved a pill form. Opium poppies were popularized, and of note, ten million opium pills were handed out to surgeons during the Civil War!
A large number of pills and medical medicines have been formulated for treating pain and 'masking reality,' and in most cases, plants have provided the chemicals. Some of those plant products are deadly, and it seems strange that some feed us and some poison us.
The manufacture of morphine began in Germany in 1827, and by the 1860's, morphine and cocaine injection kits were sold in the Sears catalogs! Cocaine was even added to Coca Cola at first until the jolt was taken away by the FDA. Heroin started in 1898 as a product of Bayer and Company in Germany. Of course, alcohol use has been debated from dim ages past, and now marijuana is under scrutiny.
What's in a pill? It is hoped that the right stuff has been covered up by a pressurized pill coating, and that time-released stuff in gelatin capsules is legit. Hope is but a little word, but oh the joy it brings!
“Hope is the thing with feathers/That perches in the soul,
and sings the tune without words/And never stops at all.” --Emily Dickinson
“Be like the bird which on frail branches balanced/A moment sits and sings;/He feels them tremble but sings unshaken,/Knowing that he has wings.” --Victor Hugo