The History of Word of Alcohol

When alcohol first entered the English language in the early seventeenth century denoted a kind of cosmetic, specifically an eye liner once used in the Middle East by people such as Cleopatra and Nefertiti.

Francis Bacon, for example, refers to the substance in his 1626 work of natural history called Sylva Sylvarum: “The Turkes have a black Powder, made of a Mineral called Alochole; which with a fine long Pencil they lay under their Eye-lids.”

The powder in question was derived from an ore such as antimony sulfide, stibnite or lead, which Arabic came to be known as called al kohl, meaning the black powder.

Further back, Arabic acquired the word kohl for Hebrew kakhal, meaning to stain or to paint.

The fine powder used by Arabs women to paint their faces in order to increase their beauty.

After the word was introduced to English, it continued to denote a cosmetic eye-powder for at least a century.

Its meaning had broadened to include any fine powder, especially one derived by vaporizing a solid and then allowing the vapor to condense.

By the mid seventeenth century the meaning of the word had extended further, as it came to denote any liquid that is produced via distillation, as a result, the phrase alcohol of wine began to appear at this time as a name for a distilled wine.

Alcohol was first extracted from fermented liquors about AD 800 , by an Arabian chemist.

A physician name Arnoldus de Villa who lived in the south of Europe in thirteenth century was the first suggested the use of alcohol as a medicine.

By the mid eighteenth century alcohol of wine was commonly reduced to just alcohol, and was then applied to any spirit, whether it was distilled from wine, barley, or sugar cane.

The first distilled beverage was brandy, which means literally ‘burnt wine’. Distillation was first practiced in Europe in the Middle Ages, when it was primarily conducted by physician and monks, who intended their beverages to be medicinal.

In the 1890s, the word alcoholic came to denote a person addicted to alcohol, which prompted the slang form alkie in the early 1950s.

Today, alcohol has been further broadened in chemical terminology to designed any compound consisting of a hydrocarbon group joined to a hydroxyl group.
The History of Word of Alcohol

Drug of Alcohol Discovery

Drug of Alcohol Discovery
The most widely consumed drug is, of course, alcohol. It is not surprising that alcoholic beverages were among the earliest of drugs to have been discovered since their effects must have been readily perceived within a short period of administration.

This remained a basic necessity to drug discovery until isolation and testing of active ingredients from plants in the nineteenth century.

When toxic effects also occurred with little delay, the drug was considered to be poison. However, if these were not manifest until a considerable time had elapsed, there was little likelihood they would be connected with the drug. This remains a problem for those who consumed herbal remedies, but it also applies to modern synthetic drugs.

In recent years, thousands of people were prescribed dugs such as thalidomide, benoxaprofen, practolol and others without anyone being aware of the damage these caused of the delay before it happened.

It was left to astute physicians to detect the link between theses drugs and their toxic effects.

Alcohol appears to have first been consumed in the form of wine. Evidence of wine being available over seven thousands years ago has been obtained from chemical analysis of yellow residues found in six vessels sunk in the floor of a mud brick building of the Neolithic Hajji Firuz Tepe village unearthed in the Zagros Mountain of western Iran.

The capacity of each vessel was nine liters, indicating that organized production had taken place.

Infrared, high performance liquid chromatographic and chemical analysis of the yellow residue indicated that consistent largely of calcium tartrate together with resin from the terebinth tree.

The calcium tartrate could only have come from grape juice as there is no other common natural source.

The juice would have fermented into wine on storage, while resin served as a preservative to prevent despoliation by bacteria that convert wine to vinegar.

Excavations further south in the Zagros Mountains uncovered a military center known as Godin Tepe, where earthenware jars form 3500 to 3000 BC were found. Again, deposited of calcium tartrate were present. By this time wine and beer were being prepare prepare throughout the Aegean.
Drug of Alcohol Discovery