History
Smelling salts have been used since Roman times, and are mentioned in the writings of Pliny as 'Hammonicus sal'. Evidence exists of use in the 13th century by alchemists as 'sal ammoniac'.
In the 17th century, an ammonia solution was distilled from shavings of harts' (deer) horns and hooves, which led to the alternative name for smelling salts as spirit or salt of hartshorn.
Smelling salts have also been known as 'sal volatile', for their ability to produce a reaction.
They were widely used in Victorian Britain to revive fainting women, and in some areas constables would carry a container of them for the purpose.
The use of smelling salts was widely recommended during the Second World War, with all workplaces advised by the British Red Cross and St. John Ambulance to keep 'sal volatile' in their first aid boxes. Nowadays, their use and prevalence has dramatically decreased.
Read more about this topic: Smelling Salts
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God’s property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The basic idea which runs right through modern history and modern liberalism is that the public has got to be marginalized. The general public are viewed as no more than ignorant and meddlesome outsiders, a bewildered herd.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)