Mercury Treatment

Mercury treatment refers to the historical use of mercury compounds, including mercury(II) chloride, as medicine, most notably to treat syphilis from the sixteenth century into the twentieth. The treatment was extremely toxic, and physicians and patients at the time sometimes mistook the symptoms of mercury poisoning for the symptoms of the syphilis it was believed to cure. Mercury compounds were also given more broadly in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including Blue Mass pills prescribed for constipation, depression, and toothaches, mercurous chloride used as a laxative, diuretic, and topical disinfectant, and mercury given yearly to children as a dewormer and included in infant teething powders.