heroic dose
n.— «One drop of it was fully as efficient as curiosity in killing a cat.…An early nineteenth century pharmacopoeia lists a tobacco enema. About the same time the surgeon and anatomist, Sir Ashley Cooper, recommended this in a heroic dose as a preliminary to reducing difficult hernias, because it caused such extreme languor that the patient had “not the power to exert any of the voluntary muscles of the body,” thus almost repeating the Royal Society’s classic experiment with the cat.» —“Some Old Bizarre Medical Remedies” by Hartwin A. Schulze Scientific Monthly May, 1935. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
Is there such a thing as a “neutral” accent, and if so what does it sound like? And that quirk in the way southern Californians talk about freeways. They’ll say things like take the 405 and get on the 8. Why the definite article...
Floordrobe is the new word for an old habit: piling your clothes on the floor instead of putting them away. The Oxford English Dictionary recently added an entry for it, defining floordrobe as “an untidy heap of discarded clothing left on the floor...