Unusual words 13 Calomel

Calomel is apparently a colourless, white or brown tasteless compound, Hg2Cl2, used as a purgative and insecticide. It is also called mercurous chloride.

On page 98 of Bryant's life of Macaulay, he says that Macaulay's doctor (Bright) prescribed it. It is referred to in these places

... suddenly addressing the prentices and Guster, to their consternation, "if I am told by the doctor that calomel or castor-oil is good for me, I may naturally ask what is calomel, and what is castor-oil....

Bleak House by Dickens

The latter was a feeble child, and it was only by prodigious quantities of calomel that Lady Southdown was able to keep him in life at all.

Vanity Fair by Thackeray

Novelists 20 W M Thackeray

1811-1863 Born in Calcutta, he was the son of a servant of the East India Company who was of an old and respectable Yorkshire family. In 1816 his father died and he was sent home to England. Educated at Charterhouse, he went on to Trinity College, Cambridge in 1829 but spent only a year there. After travelling on the continent, he tried first the legal profession and then journalism but these came to nothing. By this time bad investments and other mistakes had divested him of his fortune and he needed a profession. Art was his next project, which involved studying in Paris and Rome. In 1836 he had married in Paris, returning to England the following year. He wrote for several magazines but his contributions to Punch were the hat first to gain public attention. The major turning point was the publication in monthly numbers of his best known novel Vanity Fair (1847–48). Pendennis, largely autobiographical, followed in 1848–50. Esmond (1852) is considered by some his masterpiece. It was followed by The Newcomes (1853) and the less successful The Virginians, a sequel to Esmond (1857–59). For some years he suffered spasms of the heart then suddenly died suddenly during the night of December 23, 1863. His wife had also been suffering ill health for some years. It has been written of him that “he was master of a style of great distinction and individuality, and ranks as one of the very greatest of English novelists”.