Laudanum example, the wife of the US president Abraham Lincoln, was a laudanum addict, as was the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was famously interrupted in the middle of an opium-induced writing session of "Kubla Khan" by a "person from Porlock". Initially a working class drug, laudanum was cheaper than a bottle of gin or wine, because it was treated as a medication for legal purposes and not taxed as an alcoholic beverage. Laudanum was used in home remedies and prescriptions, as well as a single medication. For example, a 1901 medical book published for home health use gave the
Desensitization (medicine) include: Desensitization (medicine) In medicine, desensitization is a method to reduce or eliminate an organism's negative reaction to a substance or stimulus. In pharmacology, "drug desensitization" is equivalent to drug tolerance, though the latter term refers to the more general concept of subjects' reactions (positive or negative) to a drug reducing following its repeated use. For example, if a person with diabetes mellitus has a bad allergic reaction to taking a full dose of beef insulin, the person is given a very small amount of the insulin at first, so small that the person has no adverse reaction or very