Absinthism, the disease that never existed.

Absinthism was a term coined to describe the deleterious effects of chronic consumption of absinthe. The effects of absinthe were blamed on thujone, a monoterpenoid which is abundant in the oil derived from wormwood (Artemisia absinthium L.). Wormwood gets its common name from its historic use in folk medicine as an anthelmintic (killer of internal parasites).

Thujone occurs in two isomers. The alpha isomer is more potent, but the beta isomer is more abundant.

The first official recipe for absinthe was published in 1792 by Dr Pierre Ordinaire. His drink, intended as a tonic, consisted of ethanol 140 proof (70%) with several herbs added for flavour, of which the most distinctive was wormwood extract. The literature is contradictory over whether it was a Major Dubied or his son-in-law Henri-Louis Pernod who purchased the recipe from Dr Ordinaire, but there is no doubt that it was Henri-Louis Pernod who founded a distillery in 1805, which by his death in 1850 was producing 20,000 litres of absinthe every day. The Pernod bottle label still boasts that Pernod absinthe is made to ‘the original recipe’.