Keyser's Pills were an 18th-century patent medicine containing mercuric oxide and acetic acid used to treat syphilis.[citation needed]
Mercury was a common, long-standing treatment for syphilis. Keyser's pills were marketed by and named for Jean Keyser, a surgeon in the French military.[1] They were a standard treatment in the French military by the 1750s.[2] Keyser's solution of mercury mixed with acetic acid was intended to reduce the side-effects of mercury treatments, but still proved quite dangerous. A trial of four women at Bicêtre Hospital caused colic, diarrhea, fevers, nausea and vomiting, and mouth ulcers to the level of gangrene. One subject miscarried.[2]
A clinical trial of the pills was performed in Geneva in 1761 and deemed successful, which led the pills to be a considered a good treatment for some time, though not without continuing controversy and debate.[1][3][4] English physician John Pringe cautioned biographer James Boswell against taking the pills, as well as Kennedy's Lisbon Diet Drink, for his venereal disease.[5] Simon-Nicholas Henri Linguet's French novel La Cacomonade also referenced the "dragées de Keyser".[6]
The pills were also marketed in the American colonies in the 1760s and 1770s.[7]
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