Never Mind the Bullocks, Here's the Science (5 page)

Aphrodisiac

Among its many fabled qualities, absinthe was also claimed to be an aphrodisiac. This encouraged the late 19th century English poet Ernest Dowson to write: ‘I understand that absinthe makes the tart grow fonder.’

References

‘About Absinthe’,
The New York Times
, 30 July 1882.

Arnold, Wilfred Niels, ‘Absinthe’,
Scientific American
, June 1989, pp 86-91.

Hesser, Amanda, ‘A modern absinthe experiment’,
The New York Times
, 31 May 2000.

Hutton, Ian, ‘Myth, reality and absinthe’,
Current Drug Discovery
, September 2002, pp 62-64.

Lachenmeier, Dirk W., et al., ‘Thujone—Cause of absinthism?’,
Forensic Science International
, 2006, Vol 158, pp 1-8.

Loubère, Leo A.,
The Red and the White: A History of Wine in France and Italy in the Nineteenth Century’
, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1978, pp 154-167.

Padosch, Stephan A., et al., ‘Absinthism: A fictitious 19th century syndrome with present impact’,
Substance Abuse Treatment, Prevention, and Policy
, 10 May 2006, pp 1-14.

Richardson, Dr, ‘Absinthe’,
The New York Times
, 3 August 1879.

‘The charms of absinthe: The allurements it holds out to its victims, and the sting that comes afterwards, confessions of a Frenchman who succumbed to it’,
The New York Times
, 19 October 1884.

Wesibord, Steve D., et al., ‘Poison on line—acute renal failure caused by oil of wormwood, purchased through the internet’,
The New England Journal of Medicine
, 18 September 1997, pp 825-827.

Wu, C., ‘Toxin in absinthe makes neurons run wild’,
Science News
, 1 April 2000, Vol 157, No 14, p 214.

Bromide and Libido

Back in my high school days, I was in the School Cadets. Every now and then we would go to a real Army Base for Advanced Training. It was there that we heard from the regular Army soldiers that ‘someone’ put bromide in the soldiers’ food to keep their sexual libido way down. Indeed, in his book
Sex and the British
, the author Paul Ferris refers to the use of bromide to reduce the sexual libido of soldiers.

However, as is so often the case with commonly repeated rumours, it’s not true.

Lack of Libido

The myth that new recruits are so virile that they need to be tamed and contained by drugs is a backhanded compliment to the soldiers.

This fable of drugging soldiers into docility is well known to various military recruits around the world. In Poland it’s the soldiers’ coffee that has supposedly been treated, while in France the story is that soldiers are given adulterated wine. South African recruits reputedly have a mysterious substance called ‘blue-stone’ added to their food to keep them calm, while German recruits are allegedly kept in line with a double dose—the addition of iodine to their coffee as well as soda to their meat.

And in many English-speaking countries, if the anti-libido additive is not bromide, it’s saltpetre (potassium nitrate).

Taking the Bang Out of the ‘Cannon’

It has been long thought that ‘someone’ put bromide in Army food so as to keep the soldiers’ sexual libido way down – effectively taking the ‘bang’ out of their ‘cannon’.

An illustrative interpretation of a soldier’s ‘limp cannon’

BROMINE

Bromine itself is one of the 92 or so elements – it belongs to the halogen family of five elements. These halogens also include fluorine, chlorine, iodine and the rapidly decaying radioactive element called astatine.

Bromine—Part 1

Bromine is one of the 92 or so elements. It belongs to the halogen family of five elements, which also includes fluorine, chlorine, iodine and the rapidly decaying radioactive element called astatine.

The word ‘halogen’ comes from the Greek root
hal
, meaning ‘salt’, and
gen
, meaning ‘to produce’, because they all produce sodium salts which are very similar. The best known sodium salt is sodium chloride—common table salt.

There is a difference between ‘bromine’ and ‘bromide’. ‘Bromine’ is the pure naked element. A ‘bromide’ is the compound you get when you combine the element bromine with another element, or a group of elements. (In a similar way, ‘chlorine’ is an element, while ‘sodium chloride’ is the compound produced when sodium and chlorine have been combined.)

In general, halogens are very reactive, and tend to form strong acids such as HCl (hydrochloric acid) and HF (hydrofluoric acid). Hydrofluoric acid is so reactive that it will react with microscopic quantities of water in glass and actually eat the glass. For this reason, it has to be stored in special water-free glass, or containers lined with beeswax or Teflon™, or containers made of metals that immediately form a layer of inert fluoride (such as copper or steel).

Bromine is, apart from mercury, the only element that is a liquid at room temperature. It is a deep red, fuming liquid with a reddish-brown, acrid poisonous gas. As a liquid it is toxic and causes flesh burns. Some bromine compounds can cause damage to the ozone layer, and are therefore being phased out of production.

Bromine—Part 2

Bromine was discovered independently by two chemists.

In 1825, the chemist Carl Jacob Löwig separated bromine from a natural spring in his home town of Bad Kreuznach in Germany. In 1826, the French chemist Antoine-Jérôme Balard isolated bromine from the residues left in sea salt, after sea water had been evaporated. Bromine occurs at a low level in sea water, approximately 0.06-0.07 g per litre. (In the Dead Sea, the concentration is over 100 times greater—about 5 g per litre.)

Balard published his results first, and so got all the credit. The French Academy of Sciences gave this element the name ‘bromine’ from the Greek word
bromos
, meaning ‘bad or pungent odour’ or ‘stench of goats’.

Current world production of bromine is about 550,000 tonnes each year. Between 1928 and 1975, most bromine was used to make ethylene dibromide, which was added to the leaded petrols of the day to remove lead deposits from the inside of engine cylinders. Today, ethylene dibromide is used as a pesticide.

Bromine is also used in fire retardants and to make various dyes, while silver bromide is used to make photographic film (the stuff they used before digital cameras). Bromine was used in the printing industry, and so the word ‘bromide’ can also mean ‘a reproduction or piece of typesetting on bromide paper’. And tiny amounts of potassium bromate improve the baking characteristics of wheat flour.

Bromine—The Sedative

The bromides of lithium, sodium, potassium, calcium, strontium and ammonium have also long been used in medicine because of their sedative effect. This could perhaps be the origin of the
bromide myth. In the 19th century, these salts of bromine were used as sedatives to treat everything from mild difficulty in falling asleep to full-blown epilepsy. The dose was somewhere between 0.3 and 2 g, and given several times a day, to ‘reduce the excitability of the brain’. Indeed, another meaning for the word ‘bromide’ is ‘a trite or unoriginal idea or remark, typically intended to soothe or placate’, in other words, bromides create the illusion of wellbeing.

In fact, in the 19th century, children of the upper classes were surreptitiously fed salts of bromine to sedate them, calming down the natural vigour and exuberance of youth. It was delivered to them via their own personal salt shaker at the table, which was supposedly there as a mark of the children’s importance and status within the family—but was really there to keep them quiet, and in their place. This made it surprisingly easy to have ‘good’ children who complied (while lying around doped to the eyeballs) with the old adage: ‘Children should be seen, but not heard.’

So, if salts of bromine (the bromides) do have any effect in reducing libido, it’s mainly as a minor side effect of their prime use as a sedative. In other words, after taking bromide, you would have a very sleepy person on your hands, not a fully alert person with a mysteriously absent libido.

If there is a lack of libido in military recruits, it is more easily explained by their extreme exhaustion, anxiety, change of lifestyle and close contact with many other similarly exhausted colleagues.

Spike Milligan, who served with the British Army in World War II, had his own take on the effects of bromide. In his book
Rommel? Gunner Who?
, Spike wrote: ‘I don’t think that bromide had any lasting effect, the only way to stop a British soldier feeling randy is to load bromide into a 300 lb shell and fire it at him from the waist down.’

Born to the Purple Reign

The phrase ‘born to the purple’ today means somebody born into a wealthy, powerful and noble family. But 2,500 years ago, it specifically referred to especially powerful members of the Imperial Family. In the 4th century BC, the Greek historian Theopompus of Chios wrote that ‘purple for dyes fetched its own weight in silver at Colophon…in Asia Minor’.

This purple story relies on our New Best Friend, bromine.

Back then, purple dye was incredibly rare. At the time, there was only one source, the predatory sea snail gastropod
Murex brandaris.
If you poke or disturb this 60-90 mm long gastropod, it will squirt a yellow mucous secretion from its hypobranchial gland. This secretion can be processed to yield the purple dye, which was called ‘Tyrian Purple’ because the snails were first harvested around the sea port Tyre, in what is now southern Lebanon. The dye could also be extracted by crushing the snail’s shell; however, you could do this only once. By annoying the snail you could get the dye as often as you liked. It took about 12,000 snails to produce 1.4 g of Tyrian Purple – which was only enough to dye the trim of a cloak.

The Phoenicians were the first to extract this dye. The production and use of this Tyrian Purple was very tightly controlled by the elite. It was also called ‘Imperial Dye’ or ‘Imperial Purple’, because its use was restricted to the nobility. The Greeks and the Romans prized the dye, partly because it did not fade. In his
Natural History
, Pliny the Elder wrote:‘…the Tyrian hue…is considered of the best quality when it has exactly the colour of clotted blood, and is of a blackish hue to the sight, but of a shining appearance when held up to the light; hence it is that we find Homer speaking of “purple blood”.’

In the 1700s and 1800s, various related sea snail species that produced a similar purple dye were discovered (in the eastern Pacific and the western Atlantic oceans).

The chemical name of this dye is 6,6’-dibromoindigo – and as you can tell from the ‘bromo’ in the name, it contains bromine. The chemical formula was discovered only as recently as 1909, by the chemist Paul Friedlander.

Flat Tyre

From 2,000 to 4,000 years ago, the Phoenicians used Tyre as a port. The city originally had two parts – one on an island about 800 m off the coast and another on the mainland.

Tyre and its inhabitants suffered mightily at the hands of Alexander the Great.

He laid siege to it for seven months, and finally took it in 332 AD. He completely wiped out the mainland city, then used the rubble to construct an enormous land bridge – approximately 180-270 m wide and 800 m long – from the shore to the city on the island. He then executed 10,000 citizens and sold another 30,000 into slavery.

The land bridge still stands today.

References

Encyclopaedia Britannica
, 2008 Ultimate Reference Suite—‘Murex’, ‘Tyre’, ‘Theopompus of Chios’ and ‘Heracles’.