Anodyne

An anodyne is a drug used to lessen pain through reducing the sensitivity of the brain or nervous system.[1] The term was common in medicine before the 20th century,[2][1][3] but such drugs are now more often known as analgesics or painkillers.

For other uses, see Anodyne (disambiguation).

Name

The name derives from Greek anōdynos (ἀνώδυνος), from an- (αν-, "without") and odynē (ὀδύνη, "pain").[1]

Use

Etymologically, the term covers any substance that reduces pain, but the term was used more restrictively by doctors.[1] Some definitions restrict the term to topical medications, including herbal simples such as onion, lily, root of mallows, leaves of violet, and elderberry. Other definitions include ingested narcotics, hypnotics, and opioids.[4] In the 19th century, the primary anodynes were opium, henbane, hemlock, tobacco, nightshade ("stramonium"), and chloroform.[1]

Certain compound medicines were also called by this name, such as anodyne balsam, made of castile soap, camphor, saffron, and spirit of wine, and digested in a sand heat. It was recommended not only for easing extreme pain, but for assisting in discharging the peccant matter that occurred with the pain.

In literary usage, the word has escaped its strictly medical meaning to convey anything "soothing or relaxing" (since the 18th century) or even anything "non-contentious", "blandly agreeable", or unlikely to cause offence or debate.[5]

gollark: It sounds like their data collection is biased toward the sort of person who uses toolbars.
gollark: <@100383274370617344> I assume it's Alexa the website ranking thing, not Alexa the virtual assistant and spying devices.
gollark: And added a better cooler somehow.
gollark: I wonder how fast it could go if you overclocked it to death.
gollark: At last, I have managed to read my ebooks on a non-Amazon reader and it only took installing Calibre, installing the DeDRM plugin, copying over the folder on my tablet's SD card to my laptop via MTP, importing that, finding out that it recognized the metadata fine but could not actually view the contents, trawling the internet for somewhat dubious old copies of Kindle for PC, installing that in Wine, frantically turning off "automatically update" options before it did something, downloading my books, deregistering old devices because apparently I have a limited amount of devices available per book, downloading the ones which complained, figuring out where the Kindle for PC thing actually saved old books to, running the DeDRM DRM key finding thing, finding that that, not very unexpectedly, didn't work with a Wine install, installing Python 2 in Wine, running the DRM key finding script within the not-really-Windows-install, importing the key into the plugin, and then importing all the book files.

See also

Notes
  1. EB (1878).
  2. Cyclopaedia (1728).
  3. EB (1911).
  4. Quain (1883).
  5. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/anodyne#Adjective

References
  • Chambers, Ephraim, ed. (1728), "Anodyne", Cyclopædia, James & John Knapton.
  •  Baynes, T. S., ed. (1878), "Anodyne" , Encyclopædia Britannica, 2 (9th ed.), New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, p. 90
  • Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911), "Anodyne" , Encyclopædia Britannica, 2 (11th ed.), Cambridge University Press, p. 79
  • Quain, Richard (1883), A Dictionary of Medicine: Including General Pathology, General Therapeutics


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