Paregoric

Paregoric, or camphorated tincture of opium, also known as tinctura opii camphorata, is a medication known for its antidiarrheal, antitussive, and analgesic properties.

History

In the early 18th century, Jakob Le Mort (1650–1718), a professor of chemistry at Leiden University, prepared an elixir for asthma and called it "paregoric". The word "paregoric" comes from the Greek word "paregoricon" which was originally applied to oratory and to a particular form of oratory in which distraction of attention was the predominant feature. It then passed through various shades of meaning from "consoling" to "soothing" and finally came to have the same significance as "anodyne". Le Mort's elixir, consisting of "honey, licorice, flowers of Benjamin, and opium, camphor, oil of aniseed, salt of tartar and spirit of wine," became official as "Elixir Asthmaticum" in the London Pharmacopoeia of 1721. Paregoric was used in various formulations for hundreds of years, and its ingredients "were assembled out of the obsolete humoral philosophy and quasiscientific reasoning of the Renaissance." In 1944, two clinicians who evaluated the expectorant action of Paregoric concluded: "The survival of paregoric through the centuries, and particularly through recent critical decades is probably due to keen clinical observation and stubborn adherence to the clinical deduction that paregoric is useful in certain types of cough."