black draught

English

Noun

black draught (plural black draughts)

1. A cathartic medicine composed of senna and magnesia.
   • 1850, Charles Dickens, chapter 7, in David Copperfield‎^[1]:

     He was taken ill in the night—quite prostrate he was—in consequence of Crab; and after being drugged with black draughts and blue pills, to an extent which Demple (whose father was a doctor) said was enough to undermine a horse's constitution, received a caning and six chapters of Greek Testament for refusing to confess.

   • 1871, George Eliot, chapter 16, in Middlemarch‎^[2]:

     "You medical gentlemen must consult which sort of black draught you will prescribe, eh, Mr. Lydgate?"

Part or all of this entry has been imported from the 1913 edition of Webster’s Dictionary, which is now free of copyright and hence in the public domain. The imported definitions may be significantly out of date, and any more recent senses may be completely missing.
(See the entry for “black draught”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.)