Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (chapter 92, "Ambergris")
primary document · 1851
LINK
SUMMARY
Full chapter text fetched directly from Wikisource. States, of a sick whale's ambergris-related indigestion: 'How to cure such a dyspepsia it were hard to say, unless by administering three or four boat loads of Brandreth's pills, and then running out of harm's way, as laborers do in blasting rocks.' Used in this bundle as direct textual evidence that Brandreth's pills had become a byword for a drastic, oversized purgative dose in mainstream American literature by 1851, cited alongside a comparable direct citation to Poe's 1845 story for the same point.
NOTES
Chapter 92 of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), fetched directly from its Wikisource transcription, uses Brandreth’s pills as the go-to comic image of a drastic, oversized purgative dose: curing a whale’s indigestion would take “three or four boat loads of Brandreth’s pills.” This is used in the bundle as direct literary evidence, not a search-tool paraphrase, that the pills were a recognizable mainstream byword within Brandreth’s own lifetime.