| It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Blue mass. (Discuss) |
In medicine, the blue pill, also called the pilula hydrargyri, was a remedy prescribed for various ailments, particularly constipation. It contained 1/3 elemental mercury by weight, mixed with marshmallow, honey of rose, liquorice, glycerin, and inert ingredients to form pills of about 48 grains in weight.
A combination of the blue pill, and a mixture called the common black draught, was a standard cure for constipation in early 19th century England and elsewhere. It was particularly valued on ships of the Royal Navy, where sailors and officers were constrained to eat rock-hard salted beef and pork, old, stale biscuits, and very little fruit, fiber, or other fresh food once they were some distance from land on a long voyage.
In Popular Culture
The term bluepill was popularized in science fiction culture via the 1999 movie The Matrix. The movie relies on the premise that an artificial reality that is advanced enough will be indistinguishable from reality and that no test exists that can conclusively prove that reality is not a simulation. This ties in closely with the skeptical idea that the everyday world is illusory. In the movie, a Redpill is the term used to describe a human who has been freed from the Matrix, a fictional computer-generated world set in 1999. Bluepill refers to a human still connected to the Matrix.
Borrowing from the movie, the terms blue pill and red pill have become a popular metaphor for the choice between the blissful ignorance of illusion (blue) and embracing the sometimes painful, sometimes pleasant, truth of reality (red).
See also
External links
This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
| This pharmacology-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)




