Definitions

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  • noun Plural form of cathartic.

Etymologies

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Examples

  • Dyspepsia may commence and proceed so insidiously as not to excite the suspicion of friends, although the patient generally desires active treatment, such as cathartics, emetics, and medicines to act upon the liver.

    The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English or, Medicine Simplified, 54th ed., One Million, Six Hundred and Fifty Thousand Ray Vaughn Pierce 1877

  • Issues include indications and preferred methods for gastric decontamination, use of oil-based cathartics, and the use of steroids or antibiotics.

    Hydrocarbon Ingestion 2010

  • Anyone who takes laxatives or cathartics, such as castor oil, during an attack of appendicitis, runs great danger.

    A Look at Appendicitis 2008

  • You may find that portentous, pompous, or haughty, but I write what I feel and know as a means of expressing my inner thoughts, reflections and knowledge – a method of cathartics – not what I think any given reader expects to find within my prose.

    Spitzer's Whore Should Not Make a Nickel 2008

  • Emetics and cathartics I shall not administer, because I am sure you do not want them; but for alteratives you must expect a great many; and I can tell you that I have a number of NOSTRUMS, which I shall communicate to nobody but yourself.

    Letters to his son on The Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman 2005

  • Instead of the lancet, the drastic cathartics, and the calomel with which our naval surgeons slew their patients, he employed emetics and tonics to an extent that would have charmed my late friend, Dr. Dickson, the chromothermalist, and he preceded Dr. Hutchinson in the use of quinine wine.

    Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo 2003

  • In the Middle Ages, bloodletting and powerful cathartics were often applied, and searing irons to the lips.

    Knotted Tongues Benson Bobrick 1995

  • A decade later, Marshall Hall, in Diseases of the Nervous System, blamed stuttering on an emotional disposition, and prescribed cathartics and “speaking in a subdued, continuous tone, first dilating the thorax.”

    Knotted Tongues Benson Bobrick 1995

  • In the Middle Ages, bloodletting and powerful cathartics were often applied, and searing irons to the lips.

    Knotted Tongues Benson Bobrick 1995

  • A decade later, Marshall Hall, in Diseases of the Nervous System, blamed stuttering on an emotional disposition, and prescribed cathartics and “speaking in a subdued, continuous tone, first dilating the thorax.”

    Knotted Tongues Benson Bobrick 1995

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