Check out your medical insurance policy. Do you see anything in there about “biliousness?” In the 18th and 19th centuries there were pills galore for that ailment. I’ve seen lots of black and white advertisements for bilious pills in old newspapers from that era. Apparently the whole human race was wrestling with biliousness way back then. I guess my question is when did they find a cure for that plague upon mankind?

Go to some squeaky clean doctor today fresh out of medical school and tell him you’re bilious. I bet he’d look at you the same way he would if you asked him to make a house call. “What’s that?” he’d probably think.

The way I understand it, a bilious person suffered from digestive problems. They had stomach pains or were constipated or suffered from other symptoms I won’t go into lest some refined reader experience an onset of dizziness or light-headedness caused by another of those old maladies, namely, the “vapors.” (Let’s just say you could sometimes “hear” the bilious person and leave it at that.)

All those bilious pills that were on the market 150 to 200 years ago purported to counteract bile from which the word “bilious” comes. Back then it was thought that there were four bodily “humors” brought on by either black bile, yellow bile, phlegm or blood. It was an excess of yellow bile that brought on biliousness, or so it was theorized. As history records, it was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Rush, who was responsible for one of the better known “medicines” for biliousness. “Dr. Rush’s Bilious Pills” actually accompanied Lewis & Clark on their mapping expedition in the Louisiana Territory. “Dr. Rush’s Bilious Pills” — the ones that were in Lewis & Clark’s “first aid kit” — are described by author Sam Kean as 600 mercury laxatives “each four times the size of an aspirin.” No wonder Kean nicknamed them “Thunderclappers.”

Anyway, that old adage about the cure being worse than the disease held true with Benjamin Rush’s Bilious Pills. Some of the explorers’ teeth and hair fell out from prolonged use of the mercury-laden medication. The good news, however, is that Kean says to this very day historians are able to pinpoint the locations of Lewis & Clark’s campsites from long ago by the deposits of mercury in the soil where the explorers dug latrines. George Washington may have slept here and there, but darn if members of the Lewis & Clark expedition didn’t, uh, “squat” all over the Louisiana Territory and leave the evidence behind.

I see lots of historical lessons to be learned from biliousness and bilious pills. For one, the medical/healthcare and pharmacological enterprises in this country have apparently reverted back to that old colonial belief that the worse a medicine tastes the more effective it actually is. That translates today into, “Here, swallow this bitter pill regarding health costs and insurance premiums and you’ll feel better.”

On the other hand, it is encouraging to know that history won’t ultimately forget what patriots like Benjamin Rush do and did. Sign the Declaration of Independence: good thing. Cure biliousness with mercury-loaded laxatives: not so good. Legacies are ultimately left behind to be found if nowhere else in the little deposits of human misery buried in the soil of This Great Experiment which is America.

Of course, there is always revisionist history. I’m reminded of that what with the recent opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Library at Southern Methodist University. By the time history is rewritten by some W. will be one of the great modern presidents. Let those same revisionists get their hands on “Dr. Rush’s Bilious Pills” and you know what you’ve got? Vitamins, baby; nothin’ but vitamins!

Bob Morgan is a retired, award-winning journalist and an author.