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#color theory childrens hospital meme and i knew
qeyond · 1 year
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Beyond…..dentist…..please…..I am decomposing
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"oh the decor? I actually did it all by myself, can you tell? I took a color theory course in college."
The framed photo is actually from his own personal collection! He thought adding the motivational posters and the "rest in peace" would help calm patients. :) He's very proud, please don't be rude.
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rosethornewrites · 2 years
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I didn’t get a Tumblr until 2019, when I got back into fandom. 
Prior to that, I knew of Tumblr, but when I tried to understand how Tumblr worked my brain protested. Having a community of people to follow on Tumblr helped significantly, even if I now eschew much of that community due to fandom drama.
Now I prefer Tumblr to other so-called social media, because I find it easer to navigate and find what I want. I also like that my dash is chronological, so I am not missing things due to bullshit algorithms.
I also love that Tumblr creates memes that wind up on other social media sites, and also if you reference something from Tumblr, other people who are on Tumblr immediately understand.
Example: I reference the children’s hospital and color theory meme in my class when talking about design for multimodal elements/projects. Every semester, a Tumblr using student looks at me in absolute glee and chimes in to add further explanation.
I’m glad I didn’t decide I could never understand Tumblr and gave it a try.
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unpretty · 3 years
Text
astielle ch 28 spoiler ask dump~~
anonymous asked:
Tauril-form is puberty, because that's when his voice changes. Abysscale-form is college-age because that's when he goes to his first orgy.
anonymous asked:
You called Abysscale-form college-age (which does not preclude teenage sexscapades given the ages that go to college) and that tracks with how I think of Tauril-form as going through puberty (because of the voice-change). But if Tauril is the horny teenager that's kind of sad. Because as Minnow has pointed out many times That Dick Will Kill.
not each other, it won't!! although i imagine taurils sleeping with each other would have the bro-iest vibe. very bill and ted. taurils also have Options with people who aren't giant bull centaurs, it's just awkward is all. fortunately for everyone taurils are actually adults and are not full of hormones, they just have zero impulse control and when they like someone they want to impress them and spend time with them and it doesn't necessarily occur to them to get their dicks involved in the situation (karzarul's mind was elsewhere the first time he was a tauril)
anonymous asked:
When Violet said monsters make the best mercenaries and throw the best parties I didn't think about it, but the fact that all the impyrs came into being with swordsmanship skills equal to Lynette probably had something to do with the former. Even if ten isn't that many, THEY COME BACK. (Eventually. In, like, a month.) And the others probably learned from Lynette, even if they died. Lynette's unintentional teaching, back again.
they learned from the best murdering them repeatedly
anonymous asked:
When Ari is repopulating, and he skips Black Drakonis, he says "Makes sense." But he's surprised when Violet points out that Black Drakonis is missing, so it sounds like he at least had a theory/assumption at the time for why she was skipped, but it doesn't match with the new information.
he initially just assumed that black drakonis had managed to avoid being killed the whole time, which made sense because she's a big dragon and she can just fly away if someone is trying to murder her. but generally if a bigass monster is alive someone is going to see it, especially her, because she likes finding population centers to try to guard.
anonymous asked:
"It also occurred to him that trying to get Minnow to act like she lived in a society since they were young may have negatively impacted his sense of what constituted an acceptable thing to say to a person while his dick was out." Is just HILARIOUS.
anonymous asked:
Honestly I can relate to Leonas cause just last week I was like 'I keep falling asleep in class maybe I should develop a caffeine addiction' and one of my friends was like 'pls eat more food' so I started to actually have breakfast and an after work snack and I magically stopped falling asleep in class
anonymous asked:
Minnow's hips don't lie, but castle ruins are strangely deceptive.
everyone who wasn't following along when astielleblogging intersected with kink taxonomy hell is going to be so confused if/when minnow finally gets stuck somewhere
@9ofspades asked:
Ari is my favorite again and I want him to have actual eternity to be happy with his poly soulmate throuple together. And also his big monster family. Also I think he's wrong about what the core of the Heir and Hero are - both of them have, deep in the core of their souls, the fact that they are Monsterfuckers.
for the record i have a post in my drafts with all of your readalong asks and i still haven't decided what to do with them but i enjoyed them IMMENSELY
anonymous asked:
>looking for food >ask the cook if their food is earthy or wet >she doesn't understand >pull out illustrated diagram explaining what is earthy and what is wet >she laughs and says "it's good food sir" >buy some food >its wet
@ivylaughed asked:
I love the tumblr meme references in Astielle. The guards bringing their own knives; there being an infinite variety of brassica oleracea; the fucking chocolate guy. I'm half-waiting for a children's hospital/color theory reference. Thank you for the easter eggs.
i'm glad someone read 'chocolate birdhouse' and immediately thought THAT FUCKING CHOCOLATE GUY AGAIN ashjasd
anonymous asked:
I just wanted to say that as a plant nerd and forager I deeply appreciated Minnow's surprisingly accurate botany lesson.
unfortunately all the books that leonas gave minnow are still at her house and so she cannot cite sources for the existence of hemlock, queen anne's lace, and giant hogweed
anonymous asked:
“I think you overestimate people’s willingness to admit when things don’t make sense to them," lmao Minnow has a point
will the two men she is with learn from this and start admitting when they don't know things they think they should and are confused? absolutely not.
anonymous asked:
XD Ari hears "Kavid" and immediately attempts a strategic retreat.
anonymous asked:
“‘you should get dressed’ is a complete sentence.” Is making me laugh.
it's probably for the best because if he actually had known all three of them were out there it would have taken him like an hour to get ready and he would have had at least one breakdown about how none of his outfits were good enough and it was all nari's fault
anonymous asked:
Kavid: I will be happy to HAVE YOU ALL *lascivious eyebrow wiggle* at my earliest convenience.
anonymous asked:
"he gets smaller" "in this weather who doesn't?" KITTY PLZZZ
anonymous asked:
I can't decide whether I love or hate Kavid - I have a very Specific idea in mind for his voice, though I admittedly can't figure out where I'm pulling it from. He is an Excellent character though. Lovely chapter as always :D
anonymous asked:
Before, I was entertained by Kavid. Now I love him.
anonymous asked:
Kitty, Kraven and Kavid have similar speech patterns on purpose, right??? Right?????
i was honestly imagining some kind of nonsense faux-european what-country-is-this-even-from hollywood accent but imagining that he has sounded extremely russian this whole time is extremely funny
@rose-and-bones asked:
SHE HAS A TYPE aghfgstjs
minnow having a thing for obnoxiously pretty men who think they're great aka self-recognition through the other (horny)
@speakingintothevoid asked:
“You are,” Leonas said, “an egotistical, self-important fop.” “Ye-e-es,” Kavid said without shame. “She has a type, does Starlight.” I! LOVE!! IT!!! Makes me almost think of Violet and Karzarul - our point of view character being faced with a version of themselves who are more comfortable in their own skin and our boys not knowing why that annoys them
@keleviel asked:
I rescind my earlier mild disdain, Kavid is great. Is he actually The Greatest Of Bards, or is that just more showmanship?
he rocks about as hard as you can rock on a lyre, which is probably harder than you'd think (especially if you brought a lot of drummers) (which he does)
anonymous asked:
Jakshahshsh every time a new astielle chapter comes out i read it at least twice. Kavid i love you. Leonas i love you also you fucked up lil man. And karzarul the seat. And minnow the mischievous. and just. poor nari. existing in the same world as minnow and her all-powerful boyfriends and also kavid. nari needs a raise
she really does
anonymous asked:
Bruce in Office Meeting and Leonas grabbing the wine when Kavid starts talking about Imperials solidarity.
anonymous asked:
"You would like to compare notes?""Always." Brilliant. Leonas to a t. Loving this interlude with kavid. Snuggly tipsy leonas is a treat. kavids talk of how the weather makes all of us smaller had me cackling. Also this batshit imperial conspiracy is gr8
anonymous asked:
I am suddenly much less comfortable about Leonas performing medical experiments on Minnow, though no fault of his own. :(
@mooseman13579 asked:
Leonas finding out about the weird sun empire truther stuff: haha I'm in danger
the real unanswered question is how much of this is news and how much of it is stuff he already knew and assumed was normal
@thegayknee asked:
Holy shit this is it, isnt it. This is how they fix karzarul's reputation and expose Leland. With the power of Kavid
anonymous asked:
Karzarul's Questlog: "Work on our Image" updated, The Tale of Hollow Monsters delivered to bard.
anonymous asked:
just how many of her lovers is minnow going to recruit into her questing party
she should probably be swapping people out to keep their levels consistent but instead she just keeps karzarul and leonas as her companions for every single quest
@flying-butter asked:
"Details! I need details!" "The king sucks." This is every conversation with any of the trio. Minnow likely knows how to complete half of Ari's quests and Leonas the other half, but no one talks about anything without prompting.
minnow just assumes that everyone knows what she knows because she can't possibly be the brains of the operation and meanwhile karzarul and leonas are both busy having shame
anonymous asked:
i was so excited for the lore drop but the moment Leonas sat in Karzarul's lap my brain just shut off
@themaidenisdeath asked:
oh yes, as we all know, "all business" and "taciturn" are the first words that come to mind when we think of Minnow. It reminded me of when she met Karzarul and he told her she was particularly chatty for hero. Sorry Kavid, you're just neither a Sweet, Considerate Monster with a Dick of Steel And Tentacles To Match™ nor a Twink Prince With Silky Hair, Dom Tendencies And Weird Dietary Beliefs™
@halfdeadfriedrice asked:
"what Hero business?" / "I'm the Hero. All my business is Hero business." You tell em Minnow! And then it turns out to be Quest relevant after all; all business is Hero business Also kavid's last night's makeup and messy convertible couch covered in laundry with half-empty wine bottles on the floor is THEE most visually resonant, I feel like I am visiting a college friend
leonas got very lucky that there weren't any cigarette butts floating in that wine because in his mood he might have just drank it anyway
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nancygduarteus · 7 years
Text
The Tastiest Medicine
Until about middle school, I got an annual ear infection, as well as a bout of strep throat about once every two years. For these ailments, I would inevitably be prescribed what was referred to in my home as “the pink stuff.” It was the antibiotic amoxicillin, in its pediatric liquid form, and it was a bright, chemical pink. It was delicious.
My recurrent infections may have given me more experience with amoxicillin than the average child, but the flavor was beloved enough that the internet nostalgia factory has picked up on it. A subreddit dedicated to nostalgia has a couple posts about it, one with more than 13,000 likes. There are rhapsodic tweets, and pins on Pinterest, and the pink stuff even made a cameo on a Buzzfeed list of ’90s childhood memorabilia. (Although amoxicillin has been on the market since 1972.)
What does it taste like, to inspire such devotion and meme-ing? That’s harder to answer than it seems like it should be. The flavor is often described as bubblegum, but that’s not how I remember it. I remember something fruitier, an artificial strawberry-adjacent taste.
“In my recollection it’s like a chalky, not-very-sweet strawberry, or other anonymous fruit,” says Nadia Berenstein, a Ph.D. student at the University of Pennsylvania who studies the history of flavor science. “I remember a sort of anonymous fruitiness. But definitely the chalkiness.”
An informal office poll that I sprang on my co-workers who remembered taking the drug in their youth yielded mixed results. A couple votes for bubble gum, a couple for “chalk.” My colleague Vann Newkirk provided the most evocative description: “cheap strawberry syrup, but with an aftertaste somewhere between chewing rubber gloves and aspartame.”
If I concentrate, I can summon the sense memory of the taste like a ghost to the back of my throat, and I believe I’m remembering it correctly, but I can’t quite describe it accurately. So I went on a quest to figure out just what this flavor is, where it came from, and maybe, just maybe, to taste it again.
* * *
The original formulation of amoxicillin was created by Beecham Laboratories, which later, through an elaborate series of mergers, became GlaxoSmithKline. I contacted Glaxo to see if anyone there could shed some light on where the flavor came from. “What I have been told is that the pink bubble-gum flavor which I think you are referring to was developed specifically for the U.S. market at a former GSK site in Bristol, Tennessee, and the reason for this was that the penicillin molecule has an inherently bitter taste,” a spokesperson for the company told me in an email. (Amoxicillin is in the penicillin family.) The artificial sweetener aspartame is sometimes described as bitter—so my colleague Vann was really onto something there.
But amoxicillin has been available as a generic drug since shortly after it went on the market in the 1970s, which means the version of the drug that I and my fellow ’90s babies had was probably not usually the one manufactured by GSK. “Amoxicillin is one the first drugs that developed a robust generic market,” says Jeremy Greene, a professor of the history of medicine at Johns Hopkins University. A further impediment to trying to pinpoint the precise flavor I remember is that apparently many pharmacies now offer a variety of flavors that can be added to any children’s medicine.
I bothered a pharmacist at my local CVS to help clear this up. Though most of the amoxicillin he had in stock was in pill form, he also showed me a jar of powder, which he would mix with water to create the pink liquid suspension, should a child be prescribed some. “I can smell it, you know, when I prepare [it],” he told me. “It has a flavor.” It’s fruity, he said, “somewhere between strawberry and cherry.” This particular CVS gets its amoxicillin from Teva, one of the biggest manufacturers of generic drugs, the pharmacist said.
Here’s where it gets interesting. On Teva’s website, two of the four strengths of liquid amoxicillin the company offers are listed as being “Mixed Berry Flavored.” The other two are described as “Pink, Fruit-Gum Flavored.” Now, Teva is not the only generic manufacturer of amoxicillin by any stretch (one made by Sandoz that I found contains raspberry and strawberry flavors). But the existence of these two similar-but-different flavors might explain why some people remember the pink stuff as tasting like bubble gum, while others remember fruitiness.
Another potential explanation is that human memory is endlessly fallible, but I like the idea that favors my detective skills more.
* * *
Taste is a factor in children’s medicine in a way that it’s just not for adults, who are prescribed pills for most things. And children often need the extra enticement of a familiar flavor to be coaxed into taking their medicine. But flavor used to be considered a more integral part of medicine for all ages—more than just something added to make it palatable.
Under the humoral theory of medicine, Berenstein says, “tastes themselves were correlated with the body’s humors.” So if someone’s four humors—black bile, yellow bile, blood, and phlegm—were seen to be out of balance, they’d likely be advised to avoid certain tastes, and eat more of others. A melancholic person, for example, might want to avoid vinegar (sour—just like them), and eat more sugar to balance themselves out. “It wasn’t about a spoonful of sugar making the medicine go down,” Berenstein says. “A spoonful of sugar was the medicine.”
And for bitter herbal preparations that served as medicine, Greene adds, the bitter taste was “proof of efficacy”: If it tastes gross, it must be working. But in the 20th and 21st centuries, the Western understanding of medicine came to focus on active ingredients. What Greene calls “the sensuous dimensions of medicine” got “systematically written out of the stories we tell ourselves about pharmaceuticals and the way they work.” But medicines “nonetheless have physical properties,” he says, “and those physical properties certainly influence our experience of them.”
Making children’s medicines tasty makes the experience of being sick less stressful for kids, and  helps doctors and parents get kids to take them peacefully. But there is also the danger, if they are too tasty, that kids will consume them in secret, and overdose.
Children’s aspirin is a stark example of that. St. Joseph Aspirin for Children was released in 1947. It was orange-colored and orange-flavored and often advertised as “candy aspirin.”  And “within a few years of its introduction, the incidence of aspirin poisoning in young children increased dramatically, almost five hundred percent,” writes Cynthia Connolly, a professor of nursing at the University of Pennsylvania who studies the history of pediatric health care.
“I, myself, am a former aspirin-poisoned child,” Connolly told me. It happened in 1961 or 1962, when she was 3 or 4 years old, she says. “My parents kept it up high because they knew I loved it. It had a wonderful granular taste; it tastes like a Sweet Tart. One time when they weren’t looking, I got up there and got the St. Joseph Aspirin for Children, took almost the whole bottle, and then fell off the counter and broke my arm. While still holding the medicine by the way.” Her parents found her when she screamed, and she had to go to the hospital and get her stomach pumped—and her arm set.
The dangers of candy aspirin led to the development of the safety cap, Connolly writes. And the pharmaceutical industry came to realize that it probably wasn’t a great idea to sell medicine as “candy.”
“You may recall the public service announcements from the ’80s,” Greene says, “of pills singing a chorus that went, ‘We’re not candy, even though we look so fine and dandy. Too much of us is dangerous.’ It’s a great song.”
* * *
It has been suggested to me by a couple well-meaning dream-crushers that perhaps if I tasted amoxicillin again today, it wouldn’t be the same, either because the formulation had changed, or because my palate had. Or, perhaps it was never really as delicious as I remember.
“Our memories, especially memories of being patients, are so wrapped up in moments and experience and become invested over time with additional meaning,” Greene says. “Either your vulnerability at that moment and the ability of the medicine to help you feel better, or perhaps a certain childhood relishing of this sick role, of remembering those days in which you get to stay home and watch television. I think it’s likely that you’re both encountering nostalgia for flavor and the way that particularly significant memories are oftentimes associated with smells and flavors.”
I was thwarted many times in my attempts to taste amoxicillin again. Greene initially offered to let me do a taste test, then retracted that offer after thinking it through. I asked colleagues to let me know if their kids got prescribed the drug. One person had just thrown some away, and the only other person who got some while I was reporting—my colleague Ian Bogost—lives in Georgia. Ian and I talked about finding a way to get the amoxicillin to DC, but ultimately we were too worried about the legality of transporting his child’s prescription across state lines, just so I could taste it (even if it would be a very small taste).
But while I was reporting on amoxicillin’s flavor, several people mentioned to me that the flavor they most associated with childhood illness was that of grape Dimetapp cough syrup.  Greene was one of those people—but he says he recently got it for his kids and tasted it, and “it does not live up to the nostalgia that I have generated for it in my head.”
As it became clearer and clearer that I was not going to get to taste amoxicillin again, I thought that at least my colleagues could revisit their childhood memories. Unlike the flavor I was seeking, Dimetapp can be purchased over the counter. So—not that I encourage anyone else to do this—I purchased some cough syrup and fed it recreationally to myself and my colleagues. We had a Dimetapp taste test at my desk, taking very small sips of the bright purple liquid off of plastic spoons from the kitchen.
It’s not something I ever had as a kid. My adult assessment is that it tastes pretty good. Like a melted grape Jolly Rancher, but slightly more acrid. It did not disappoint my boss Ross Andersen, who grew up with it, though. “That’s like the Proustian madeleine,” he said, after tasting a couple drops. It took him right back to his temps perdu. Vann Newkirk similarly found it “classic” but perhaps a little more medicinal than he remembered.
But my madeleine moment was not to be. Regarding his daughter’s amoxicillin, Ian assured me, “It tastes just like you think it does,” which is both small consolation, and an impossible thing for him to know with any authority.
“I’m trying to think of what the analogy is here,” Greene says. “Not the forbidden fruit, but somehow this is almost like a sort of ambrosia that you have no access to.”
Part of the nostalgic aura that surrounds amoxicillin’s flavor may well be because there isn’t a great way for adults to taste it again, unless you have kids who get prescribed it. It’s easier to romanticize something that can never be recaptured again—much like youth itself.
from Health News And Updates https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/07/the-tastiest-medicine/533937/?utm_source=feed
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ionecoffman · 7 years
Text
The Tastiest Medicine
Until about middle school, I got an annual ear infection, as well as a bout of strep throat about once every two years. For these ailments, I would inevitably be prescribed what was referred to in my home as “the pink stuff.” It was the antibiotic amoxicillin, in its pediatric liquid form, and it was a bright, chemical pink. It was delicious.
My recurrent infections may have given me more experience with amoxicillin than the average child, but the flavor was beloved enough that the internet nostalgia factory has picked up on it. A subreddit dedicated to nostalgia has a couple posts about it, one with more than 13,000 likes. There are rhapsodic tweets, and pins on Pinterest, and the pink stuff even made a cameo on a Buzzfeed list of ’90s childhood memorabilia. (Although amoxicillin has been on the market since 1972.)
What does it taste like, to inspire such devotion and meme-ing? That’s harder to answer than it seems like it should be. The flavor is often described as bubblegum, but that’s not how I remember it. I remember something fruitier, an artificial strawberry-adjacent taste.
“In my recollection it’s like a chalky, not-very-sweet strawberry, or other anonymous fruit,” says Nadia Berenstein, a Ph.D. student at the University of Pennsylvania who studies the history of flavor science. “I remember a sort of anonymous fruitiness. But definitely the chalkiness.”
An informal office poll that I sprang on my co-workers who remembered taking the drug in their youth yielded mixed results. A couple votes for bubble gum, a couple for “chalk.” My colleague Vann Newkirk provided the most evocative description: “cheap strawberry syrup, but with an aftertaste somewhere between chewing rubber gloves and aspartame.”
If I concentrate, I can summon the sense memory of the taste like a ghost to the back of my throat, and I believe I’m remembering it correctly, but I can’t quite describe it accurately. So I went on a quest to figure out just what this flavor is, where it came from, and maybe, just maybe, to taste it again.
* * *
The original formulation of amoxicillin was created by Beecham Laboratories, which later, through an elaborate series of mergers, became GlaxoSmithKline. I contacted Glaxo to see if anyone there could shed some light on where the flavor came from. “What I have been told is that the pink bubble-gum flavor which I think you are referring to was developed specifically for the U.S. market at a former GSK site in Bristol, Tennessee, and the reason for this was that the penicillin molecule has an inherently bitter taste,” a spokesperson for the company told me in an email. (Amoxicillin is in the penicillin family.) The artificial sweetener aspartame is sometimes described as bitter—so my colleague Vann was really onto something there.
But amoxicillin has been available as a generic drug since shortly after it went on the market in the 1970s, which means the version of the drug that I and my fellow ’90s babies had was probably not usually the one manufactured by GSK. “Amoxicillin is one the first drugs that developed a robust generic market,” says Jeremy Greene, a professor of the history of medicine at Johns Hopkins University. A further impediment to trying to pinpoint the precise flavor I remember is that apparently many pharmacies now offer a variety of flavors that can be added to any children’s medicine.
I bothered a pharmacist at my local CVS to help clear this up. Though most of the amoxicillin he had in stock was in pill form, he also showed me a jar of powder, which he would mix with water to create the pink liquid suspension, should a child be prescribed some. “I can smell it, you know, when I prepare [it],” he told me. “It has a flavor.” It’s fruity, he said, “somewhere between strawberry and cherry.” This particular CVS gets its amoxicillin from Teva, one of the biggest manufacturers of generic drugs, the pharmacist said.
Here’s where it gets interesting. On Teva’s website, two of the four strengths of liquid amoxicillin the company offers are listed as being “Mixed Berry Flavored.” The other two are described as “Pink, Fruit-Gum Flavored.” Now, Teva is not the only generic manufacturer of amoxicillin by any stretch (one made by Sandoz that I found contains raspberry and strawberry flavors). But the existence of these two similar-but-different flavors might explain why some people remember the pink stuff as tasting like bubble gum, while others remember fruitiness.
Another potential explanation is that human memory is endlessly fallible, but I like the idea that favors my detective skills more.
* * *
Taste is a factor in children’s medicine in a way that it’s just not for adults, who are prescribed pills for most things. And children often need the extra enticement of a familiar flavor to be coaxed into taking their medicine. But flavor used to be considered a more integral part of medicine for all ages—more than just something added to make it palatable.
Under the humoral theory of medicine, Berenstein says, “tastes themselves were correlated with the body’s humors.” So if someone’s four humors—black bile, yellow bile, blood, and phlegm—were seen to be out of balance, they’d likely be advised to avoid certain tastes, and eat more of others. A melancholic person, for example, might want to avoid vinegar (sour—just like them), and eat more sugar to balance themselves out. “It wasn’t about a spoonful of sugar making the medicine go down,” Berenstein says. “A spoonful of sugar was the medicine.”
And for bitter herbal preparations that served as medicine, Greene adds, the bitter taste was “proof of efficacy”: If it tastes gross, it must be working. But in the 20th and 21st centuries, the Western understanding of medicine came to focus on active ingredients. What Greene calls “the sensuous dimensions of medicine” got “systematically written out of the stories we tell ourselves about pharmaceuticals and the way they work.” But medicines “nonetheless have physical properties,” he says, “and those physical properties certainly influence our experience of them.”
Making children’s medicines tasty makes the experience of being sick less stressful for kids, and  helps doctors and parents get kids to take them peacefully. But there is also the danger, if they are too tasty, that kids will consume them in secret, and overdose.
Children’s aspirin is a stark example of that. St. Joseph Aspirin for Children was released in 1947. It was orange-colored and orange-flavored and often advertised as “candy aspirin.”  And “within a few years of its introduction, the incidence of aspirin poisoning in young children increased dramatically, almost five hundred percent,” writes Cynthia Connolly, a professor of nursing at the University of Pennsylvania who studies the history of pediatric health care.
“I, myself, am a former aspirin-poisoned child,” Connolly told me. It happened in 1961 or 1962, when she was 3 or 4 years old, she says. “My parents kept it up high because they knew I loved it. It had a wonderful granular taste; it tastes like a Sweet Tart. One time when they weren’t looking, I got up there and got the St. Joseph Aspirin for Children, took almost the whole bottle, and then fell off the counter and broke my arm. While still holding the medicine by the way.” Her parents found her when she screamed, and she had to go to the hospital and get her stomach pumped—and her arm set.
The dangers of candy aspirin led to the development of the safety cap, Connolly writes. And the pharmaceutical industry came to realize that it probably wasn’t a great idea to sell medicine as “candy.”
“You may recall the public service announcements from the ’80s,” Greene says, “of pills singing a chorus that went, ‘We’re not candy, even though we look so fine and dandy. Too much of us is dangerous.’ It’s a great song.”
* * *
It has been suggested to me by a couple well-meaning dream-crushers that perhaps if I tasted amoxicillin again today, it wouldn’t be the same, either because the formulation had changed, or because my palate had. Or, perhaps it was never really as delicious as I remember.
“Our memories, especially memories of being patients, are so wrapped up in moments and experience and become invested over time with additional meaning,” Greene says. “Either your vulnerability at that moment and the ability of the medicine to help you feel better, or perhaps a certain childhood relishing of this sick role, of remembering those days in which you get to stay home and watch television. I think it’s likely that you’re both encountering nostalgia for flavor and the way that particularly significant memories are oftentimes associated with smells and flavors.”
I was thwarted many times in my attempts to taste amoxicillin again. Greene initially offered to let me do a taste test, then retracted that offer after thinking it through. I asked colleagues to let me know if their kids got prescribed the drug. One person had just thrown some away, and the only other person who got some while I was reporting—my colleague Ian Bogost—lives in Georgia. Ian and I talked about finding a way to get the amoxicillin to DC, but ultimately we were too worried about the legality of transporting his child’s prescription across state lines, just so I could taste it (even if it would be a very small taste).
But while I was reporting on amoxicillin’s flavor, several people mentioned to me that the flavor they most associated with childhood illness was that of grape Dimetapp cough syrup.  Greene was one of those people—but he says he recently got it for his kids and tasted it, and “it does not live up to the nostalgia that I have generated for it in my head.”
As it became clearer and clearer that I was not going to get to taste amoxicillin again, I thought that at least my colleagues could revisit their childhood memories. Unlike the flavor I was seeking, Dimetapp can be purchased over the counter. So—not that I encourage anyone else to do this—I purchased some cough syrup and fed it recreationally to myself and my colleagues. We had a Dimetapp taste test at my desk, taking very small sips of the bright purple liquid off of plastic spoons from the kitchen.
It’s not something I ever had as a kid. My adult assessment is that it tastes pretty good. Like a melted grape Jolly Rancher, but slightly more acrid. It did not disappoint my boss Ross Andersen, who grew up with it, though. “That’s like the Proustian madeleine,” he said, after tasting a couple drops. It took him right back to his temps perdu. Vann Newkirk similarly found it “classic” but perhaps a little more medicinal than he remembered.
But my madeleine moment was not to be. Regarding his daughter’s amoxicillin, Ian assured me, “It tastes just like you think it does,” which is both small consolation, and an impossible thing for him to know with any authority.
“I’m trying to think of what the analogy is here,” Greene says. “Not the forbidden fruit, but somehow this is almost like a sort of ambrosia that you have no access to.”
Part of the nostalgic aura that surrounds amoxicillin’s flavor may well be because there isn’t a great way for adults to taste it again, unless you have kids who get prescribed it. It’s easier to romanticize something that can never be recaptured again—much like youth itself.
Article source here:The Atlantic
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