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
Drug eruption there is a complex interplay between a patient's inherited genetics, the pharmacotoxicology of the drug and the immune response that ultimately give rise to the manifestation of a drug eruption. Because the manifestation of a drug eruption is complex and highly individual, there are many subfields in medicine that are studying this phenomenon. For example, the field of pharmacogenomics aims to prevent the occurrence of severe adverse drug reactions by analyzing a person's inherited genetic risk. As such, there are clinical examples of inherited genetic alleles that are known to predict drug hypersensitivities and for which diagnostic testing is available.