Definitions
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. A drug made by rubbing up metallic mercury with confection of roses until all the globules disappear. Of this blue-pills are made.
GNU Webster's 1913
- adj. a preparation of mercury from which is formed the blue pill.
- n. See under Blue.
Examples
“Loring and George took some calomel and blue mass last night (Mr. Duvall's prescription also) and Loring has taken quinine today, neither of them has had a chill and are much better this evening.”
Lists
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discoveries
These are lexical items new to me that I've discovered in actual use (i.e. not in dictionaries, lists, or this site).
Looking back over this list, I haven't the slightest idea what mos...haymow, hawsepipe, stridor, bariatric, autotelic, apotropaic, cyanotype, tourelle, autobody, zudecca, stifado, corbeille and 1073 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for blue mass.
qroqqa Shelves in Mrs Albright's sitting-room, where they were handy to get at, held alum, for canker sores; cocoa butter, for the chest; paregoric, for colic and diarrhoea; laudanum, for pain; balsam apples, for poultices; bismuth, for the bowels; magneeshy (carbonate of magnesium), a light, chalky substance, wrapped in blue paper, that was an antacid and a gentle laxative; and calomel and blue mass, regarded by women of Aunt Margery's generation as infallible regulators of the liver. Blue mass came in the form of pills, and she made it by rubbing up metallic mercury with confection of roses.
—James Thurber, 1952, 'Daguerreotype of a Lady', in The Thurber Album Jul 10, 2008