But if I had stinted
him, in his usual quantity of wine, or forbidden him to taste it altogether,
that would only have increased his partiality for it, and made him regard it as
a greater treat than ever. I therefore gave him quite as much as his father was
accustomed to allow him; as much, indeed, as he desired to have — but into
every glass I surreptitiously introduced a small quantity of tartar-emetic,
just enough to produce inevitable nausea and depression without positive
sickness...
...and once or twice,
when he was sick, I have obliged the poor child to swallow a little
wine-and-water without the tartar-emetic, by way of medicine; and this practice
I intend to continue for some time to come; not that I think it of any real service
in a physical sense, but because I am determined to enlist all the powers of
association in my service; I wish this aversion to be so deeply grounded in his
nature that nothing in after-life may be able to overcome it.
Anne Brontë – The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848)
Straightforward aversion therapy, the core of which must have been
common knowledge for aeons. Sometimes it seems as if much of what we once knew has
been recast into jargon then regurgitated as new, technically complex and only understandable
by the initiated. As if we have been uprooted by modernity because otherwise we
would have understood too much and resisted.
