Popular Culture
In Catch-22, the medics are portrayed as using gentian violet on feet and gums as a panacea. This may be because of the fact that in World War I American soldiers returning after a leave were irrigated with Gentian violet to prevent sexually transmitted disease.
In Picnic at Hanging Rock, the orphan Sara recounts how she was once punished by an orphanage's matron, who 'painted my head with gentian violet'.
Engineering students in Canada use gentian violet to dye their skin and jackets, a tradition started by Queen's University engineering students and known colloquially as 'purpling'.
Read more about this topic: Crystal Violet
Famous quotes containing the words popular and/or culture:
“Kings govern by popular assemblies only when they cannot do without them.”
—Charles James Fox (1749–1806)
“... there are some who, believing that all is for the best in the best of possible worlds, and that to-morrow is necessarily better than to-day, may think that if culture is a good thing we shall infallibly be found to have more of it that we had a generation since; and that if we can be shown not to have more of it, it can be shown not to be worth seeking.”
—Katharine Fullerton Gerould (1879–1944)