Twentieth-century illness

MCS stands for multiple chemical sensitivity and is also known as CS (chemical sensitivity), Cl (chemical injury), El (environmental illness), TILT (toxicant-induced loss of tolerance), twentieth-century illness and IEI (idiopathic environmental intolerance). MCS is the most common term for this condition, and is used around the world. 

The perfumers of the early twentieth century were delighted to be able to use a perfectly van ill a-like product in their compounds, but one that was at least a hundred times stronger than vanilla. Thus began what was subsequently called sophisticated perfumery. For many years a perfumery culture and language based on the experience and subjectivity of a few individual experts has developed and thrived (see Perfumes). 

There were essentially three reasons for this opposition. Firstly, many macromolecular compounds in solution behave as colloids. Hence they were assumed to be identical with the then known inorganic colloids. This in turn implied that they were not macromolecular at all, but were actually composed of small molecules bound together by ill-defined secondary forces. Such thinking led the German chemist C. D. Harries to pursue the search for the rubber molecule in the early years of the twentieth century. He used various mild degradations of natural rubber, which he believed would destroy the colloidal character of the material and yield its constituent molecules, which were assumed to be fairly small. He was, of course, unsuccessful. 

Allergic to the Twentieth Century The Explosion in Environmental Allergies—From Sick Buildings to Multiple Chemical Sensitivity. Peter Radetsky. Boston Little, Brown, 1997. Provides an overview of the sufferers, skeptics and scientists engaged in the movement toward awareness of MCS and Gulf War illness. 

Charles Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition [1901] (New York Penguin, 1993), pp. 90, 289-290 James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man [1912] (New York Penguin, 1990), pp. Ill, 113, 116 Michael Denning, The Cultural Front The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London Verso, 1997), pp. 195-199. 

People long ago recognized that, depending on the dose, arsenic could either treat an illness or be used as a poison to cause death. Its medicinal use to treat syphilis and amebic dysentery ended with the introduction of penicillin and other antibiotics in the twentieth century. Arsenic-based compounds are currently used to treat some forms of cancer. As a poison, arsenic trioxide (As20 ) has several desirable qualities it looks like sugar, it is tasteless, and it only takes about a tenth of gram to kill some-... 

Pre-twentieth century society had few restrictions as to the types, purity or amounts of substances which could be dispensed for the ills of its citizens. There were isolated laws devised by individual municipalities to protect their populations from food contaminants and extremely toxic materials. But legislation on a national scale was instigated mainly during this century. During the late nineteenth century herbal remedies. 

During the first half of the twentieth century, subjective experience— both natural and drug-induced—was declared off limits to psychology. The 1953 discovery of REM sleep opened the door to a reconsideration of dreaming and other naturally altered states of consciousness that occurred in mental illness. This discovery coincided with a rise in amateur experimentation with drugs that altered waking consciousness. 

At the close of the twentieth century, the DEA reported that barbiturates represented about 20% of all depressant prescriptions in the United States. Uses ranged from epilepsy treatment to assisted suicide in Oregon. In 1997, Oregon voters approved the Death with Dignity Act, which allows doctors to prescribe lethal dosages of barbiturates to terminally ill people. 

Societies have used the medicinal properties of opium for several thousand years. Even up to the early part of the twentieth century, opium was used as a medicine to treat a large variety of conditions. For some of those conditions, particularly those involving pain and/or diarrhea, it was a highly effective treatment. However, by modern standards, most of opium s historical uses for illness would be considered medically useless or unsound because of the dangers of opium use. 

Addiction was widespread by the turn of the twentieth century, especially among the middle and upper classes, and many addicts were young to middle-aged white women who had originally taken addictive substances under the advice of their physicians. Although there are no verifiable statistics from that time, estimates range from 100,000 to more than one million addicts in the United States. Unlike today, opium use was not associated with criminality but with illness. 

In the early part of the twentieth century, marijuana and hashish (concentrated resin from the hemp plant) became popular with artists and musicians, who felt that marijuana enhanced their creativity. Moreover, all sorts of excessive behavior, including violence and mental illness, became associated with marijuana. In 1936, a movie called Tell Your Children was financed by a small church group who wanted to deliver a strong cautionary message to parents about the evils of... 

Many researchers have studied the relationship between marijuana and mental illness. Early twentieth century proponents of marijuana prohibition in the United States often cited studies showing a link between marijuana and insanity and referred to reports of large numbers of institutionalized mental patients in India and Egypt who had used marijuana. However, since the 1970s, researchers have effectively refuted the claims of a direct link between marijuana use and mental illness. 

One of the first chemical processes to produce dioxins in significant amounts as contaminating by-products was the production of chloroph-enols. These chemicals replaced the more toxic phenol as an antiseptic in the twentieth century and TCP (2,4,6-trichlorophenol) was widely used in the UK (my mother used it liberally in our home) for treating cuts and grazes, as a mouthwash, and in pastilles (the latter are stiU available). However, synthesis of this disinfectant produced dioxins as contaminants, including both TCCD and TCDF, the two most potent. It is likely that, at least until it was realized that this contamination took place, TCP contained some dioxin. Whether this was responsible for any ill health is... 

Since the 1950s, the psychiatric community has had the benefit of antimanic and antidepressant medications to treat manic-depressive illnesses. These medications were developed using the work of Emil Kraepelin, a German physician who wrote about mental illness in the late nineteenth century and early part of the twentieth century. Kraepelin had carefully noted distinguishing symptoms among mental patients and had followed the course of the various illnesses in many of them. He was the first to distinguish what he called dementia praecox, now called schizophrenia, and was able to differentiate this illness from manic depression. 

Menopause was described clearly in 1899 in an article entitled Epochal Insanities, under the heading Climacteric Insanity. The article described symptoms of menopause and invited physicians to treat it as a syndrome in need of attention. Women in the late nineteenth century were often advised to rest as a way of combating menopausal symptoms. By the early twentieth century, menopause was seen as the death of the woman in the woman. Contemporary research has shown that menopause is not linked to mental illness or the death of the womb. The average woman of 51 can expect several more decades of life, making menopause more a transitional stage of life. 

Most severely ill patients in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries continued to be housed in overcrowded state mental hospitals and were "treated" using tried and true methods of the day seclusion, restraint, and wet sheet packs. Although seemingly inhumane procedures were employed, it may be important to consider that the psychiatrists of that era were relatively helpless in the face of very severe mental illnesses and that these approaches (although certainly misused at times) reflected their attempt to reduce the horrendous human suffering seen in thousands of severely ill people. 

In the Balkans, an ancient folk ritual (still practised in the early part of the twentieth century) involved not so much dancing as running through a circle of burning hemp. As the peasants scampered through the flames, they chanted in unison "We have been in the fire and not been burnt, we have been in the midst of illness and not caught it."... 

According to the U.S. National Library of Medicine, one of the worst results of the ill effects of patent medicine use in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the number of healthy babies who became addicted to morphine, heroine, opium, or alcohol. How did babies develop these addictions Well, imagine being a mother or father with an infant who won t stop crying. The baby shrieks night and day. You never get to sleep. You can t rest. You re exhausted and your child is miserable. As a parent, if you could find a cure for your baby s misery, would you buy it Of course you would, just as thousands did at the turn of the twentieth century. 

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