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"600 giant pills that the men called 'thunder-clappers,'"

I love little reminders that people haven't changed that much over the centuries

Here is an article that actually describes the search for the mercury in the laxatives: https://www.discovermagazine.com/following-lewis-and-clarks-...

> THESE PILLS WERE the pride and joy of Dr. Benjamin Rush, one of the Founding Fathers and a signer of the Declaration of Independence.

Later, a descendent of Dr Rush would go down in infamy for a foolhardy escapade to the Titanic in a carbon-fiber submersible called Titan.

> Dr. Rush’s style of “heroic medicine” had caused his star to fall quite a bit by this time — especially after the Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic of 1793, when his patients died at a noticeably higher rate than untreated sufferers.

Seems familiar...

Travelling thousands of miles overland, in constant fear of ambush from a fearsome plains tribe war party, alternating between intense constipation and explosive diarrhea - bet they didn't put all that on the brochure when they were signing folks up to paddle the canoes.

Meta: I love these 90s-2000s website aesthetic. Simple HTML, less CSS, extremely good readability, very little telemetry and data collection (in general). I wish we could go back to that era. It felt like every website was a beautiful discovery journey than just the same old bland minimalist, flat design bs every site has today with "aCcEpT cOokIeS" banners with dark patterns throughout.

/endrant

Undaunted Courage by Stephen Ambrose is a great book about the expedition. I picked it up on a trip to the US and really enjoyed it.

One of my favourite things I didn't know was that they kept getting to new 'untouched' villages of Native Americans who would come out to trade and knew perfectly well that white people existed as they'd been visited for years by various fur traders.

I wonder if they did eat some plants, but just didn’t get enough fiber? I eat no fiber (strict carnivore) but have no problem with regular bowel movements.

This article just shows up on the front page of HN as I drink senna tea... perfect.

Interesting. Just reading the Lonesome Dove series of books, and the cowboys often seem to have the opposite problem after drinking from alkaline rivers, puddles etc.

From the image linked for the later "milder recipe", there was 0.12g mercuric chloride per dose. The article says that one dose during the expedition was 10 grains (0.6g) of Calomel. This seems like a fairly small amount of mercury to try to find over 200 years later.

File under: Things I didn't really want to know. An interesting read nonetheless...

Of course, Tom Scott and the Citation Needed crew made an amazing episode about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrO_ZMQ8aFc

I'm dying laughing. Imagine Lewis and Clark, thinking they're forging this epic, heroic legacy for the ages... and their most permanent, scientifically-proven trail is literally toxic poop. History has a WILD sense of humor.

mystery biscuitssss ohhhh yeah