Medicine
In medical usage, heavy metals are loosely defined and include all toxic metals irrespective of their atomic weight: "heavy metal poisoning" can possibly include excessive amounts of iron, manganese, aluminium, mercury, cadmium, or beryllium (the fourth lightest element) or such a semimetal as arsenic. This definition excludes bismuth, the densest of approximately stable elements, because of its low toxicity.
Minamata disease results from mercury poisoning, and itai-itai disease from cadmium poisoning.
Read more about this topic: Heavy Metal (chemistry)
Famous quotes containing the word medicine:
“The only medicine for suffering, crime, and all the other woes of mankind, is wisdom.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“God isn’t compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“For this invention of yours will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn it, by causing them to neglect their memory, inasmuch as, from their confidence in writing, they will recollect by the external aid of foreign symbols, and not by the internal use of their own faculties. Your discovery, therefore, is a medicine not for memory, but for recollection,—for recalling to, not for keeping in mind.”
—Plato (c. 427–347 B.C.)