There is medicine in literature

From Goodman & Gilman’s Pharmacology, Chapter 22

William Shakespeare described the acute pharmacological effects of imbibing ethanol in the Porter scene (act 2, scene 3) of Macbeth. The Porter, awakened from an alcohol-induced sleep by Macduff, explains three effects of alcohol and then wrestles with a fourth effect that combines the contradictory aspects of soaring overconfidence with physical impairment:

Porter: . . . and drink, sir, is a great provoker of three things.

Macduff: What three things does drink especially provoke?

Porter: Marry, sir, nose-painting [cutaneous vasodilation], sleep [CNS depression], and urine [a consequence of the inhibition of antidiuretic hormone, vasopressin, secretion, exacerbated by volume loading]. Lechery, sir, it provokes and unprovokes: it provokes the desire but it takes away the performance. Therefore much drink may be said to be an equivocator with lechery: it makes him and it mars him; it sets him on and it takes him off; it persuades him and disheartens him, makes him stand to and not stand to [the imagination desires what the corpus cavernosum cannot deliver]; in conclusion, equivocates him in a sleep, and, giving him the lie, leaves him.

*Bracketed additions to Porter’s words explain in scientific terms what shakespeare so eloquently described

September 22, 2009. Med School.