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Sedative   /sˈɛdətɪv/   Listen
Sedative

noun
1.
A drug that reduces excitability and calms a person.  Synonyms: depressant, downer, sedative drug.



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"Sedative" Quotes from Famous Books



... other subjects; and when a feminine mind is once made up (others than ladies have feminine minds on these subjects) it is very little use trying to alter it. I never do. I administer some orthodox verbal sedative, and change the subject. But even accepting the term in the way I know it is meant to be used—say, for instance, as it comes from the mouth of some conservative old gentleman, or supposed scientific authority—one's medical man to wit—"Do you believe in ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies

... come on. Let her son, who was a snob, come on. Let Mr. THORNTON come on. Let every body come on. He defied every body. He expectorated upon every body. (Mr. CHANDLER by this time became so earnest that seven Senators were constrained to wait upon him, but it produced no sedative effect.) Mr. CHANDLER kept on in this manner until he had challenged the population of the planet to single combat, and then subsided, and ordered five hundred copies of the morrow's Globe to send to various potentates ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 7, May 14, 1870 • Various

... a particular nerve, and from reflecting upon its causes, and observing the effect of topical sedatives, I was led to the conclusion, that the most direct way of quieting this state was by the application of warmth and sedative vapour to the part, so as to soothe the nerves, and calm them into regular action. For this purpose, I devised an apparatus which answers the purpose sufficiently well. It is a kind of fumigating instrument, in ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 442 - Volume 17, New Series, June 19, 1852 • Various

... a complete sedative, and the Laird relapsed from that day into his former taciturn habits, visiting the cowfeeder's cottage three or four times every week, when the weather permitted, with apparently no other purpose than to stare at Jeanie Deans, while ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... cocoanut trees, and extending the entire length of the house, at least two hundred feet, was covered by the reclining forms of a host of chiefs and warriors who were eating at a great rate, or soothing the cares of Polynesian life in the sedative fumes of tobacco. The smoke was inhaled from large pipes, the bowls of which, made out of small cocoanut shells, were curiously carved in strange heathenish devices. These were passed from mouth to mouth by the recumbent smokers, each of whom, taking two or ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville

... from my pouch, but looked up a little surprised, and said, "Of course." He then puffed away with the nervous eagerness of a man long deprived of that sedative. Finally, between the puffs, he ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte

... enough to be noisily stylish, but in a quiet way it is select and severe. It is patronized by ladies more than by the sterner sex. Its springs are mild, helpful for cases of hysteria and atonic dyspepsia; and the nervous, middle-aged females who frequent it find a grateful sedative in the air and surroundings as well as in the springs. The hotels have the garb of prosperity, and the location, commanding both the Gavarnie gorge and the valley of Luz,-could not have been better chosen; in fact, headquarters for the trip to the Cirque might be and usually are fixed here quite ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix

... fluid operated as a sedative on the Mongo, and glued him to his chair in a comfortable nap, it had a contrary effect on my exhilarated nerves. I strolled to the verandah to get a breath of fresh air from the river, but soon dashed ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer

... sativa) is the common hemp plant, which provides hallucinogens with some sedative properties, and includes marijuana (pot, Acapulco gold, grass, reefer), tetrahydrocannabinol (THC, Marinol), hashish (hash), and hashish oil ...
— The 1993 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... poet has sustained me in many and varied afflictions. Not to know it is to dispense with an unfailing source of consolation in trouble. When using it at a patient's bedside, I have found that it invariably acted as a sedative to an excited mind. I sometimes think," he added gently, "that if Tina had not been ignorant of Latin, she would have had a—a ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow

... brought to me for examination. He had vomited a considerable quantity of coagulated blood. I happened to be particularly busy at the moment, and not observing anything peculiar in his countenance or manner, I ordered some astringent sedative medicine, and said that I would see him ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt

... pieces; while the cries for help from the broken-shinned, sea-sick landsmen, the bawling for cleats and lashings from the mate of the decks, the thumping of hammers, and the loud laugh of the light-hearted middies, enchanted with the uproar, make a fine concert. The sedative effect of two or three hours of this work exceeds fresh-water belief; so that in a day or two, Messrs. Neptune, Boreas, First Lieutenant, and Co., have re-established their legitimate authority so completely, that neither servants, nor any other passengers, ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall

... concert-room, that rut that limits the play of the imagination of audiences, that fortress in which all of the intentions of the men of the past have established themselves, and from which they dominate the musical present. The concert-room has succeeded in making music a drug, a sedative, has created a "musical attitude" in folk that is false, and robbed musical art of its power. For Strawinsky music is either an infection, the communication of a lyrical impulse, or nothing at all. And so he would have it performed in ordinary places of congregation, at fairs, ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld

... deficiencies) for thoroughly industrious study, and for keeping, if possible, externals and mentals in more order. Order, I believe, would enable me to do much more than I do in this way, without lessening those little "good works" which my natural, unsanctified conscience requires as a sedative; (alas that this is so nearly all!) but I have got such an impression of selfishness in sitting down to read to myself, that this, added to unsettlement from company, etc., almost puts ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall

... wholly err:—for Heaven did gift her with that diviner power, when it planted in so soft a heart the enduring might and energy of Affection! The friar had visited the sick man late on the third night, and administered to him a strong sedative. "This night," said he to Irene, "will be the crisis: should he awaken, as I trust he may, with a returning consciousness, and a calm pulse, he will live; if not, young daughter, prepare for the worst. But should you note any turn ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... let him talk about what he has gone through," said the doctor a short time later, when he had made his fresh patient as comfortable as circumstances would allow, and he was growing drowsy from the sedative administered. "It's not sunstroke, but a mingling of the results of exposure and overdoing it altogether. I don't quite understand it yet, and I want to get at the truth without ...
— The Kopje Garrison - A Story of the Boer War • George Manville Fenn

... wearing off. There was an unhealthy streak in his mind somewhere, a streak that was growing under these blows which had been so liberally dealt him. Where was the use in struggling? he began to ask himself. And the poison of the thought acted like a sedative. He grew strangely calm; he almost experienced pleasure and comfort under its influence. Why struggle? Nothing could go right with him. Nothing. He was cursed—cursed with an ill-starred fortune. This sort of thing was ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum

... Garrick explained, "a sleep-producing bullet, if you please, a sedative bullet that lulls its victim into almost instant slumber. It was invented quite recently by a Pittsburgh scientist. The anesthetic bullet provides the poor marksman with all the advantages of the expert gunman ...
— Guy Garrick • Arthur B. Reeve

... time the administering of the sedative was ended, the professor had withdrawn with the bottle and glass, and the Hakim once more took hold of the sufferer's swarthy wrist, to remain counting the pulsations for many minutes, before laying the hand gently down and rising to stand, with folded arms, gazing ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn

... existence before, and now the Presbyterian ministry will be a subordinate ecclesiastical aristocracy, whose feeling will be that of zealous loyalty, and whose influence on those people will be as purely sedative when it should be, and exciting when it should be, as it was the reverse before." Those who blame Pitt for not having carried through his schemes of concurrent endowment, and who see in his failure to do so, one reason for the ill success of his policy of Union, must admit the ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell

... against the blind vagaries of the man; and get a great deal of good by him, in the lucid intervals." To Voltaire himself the position is most agitating; but then its glories, were there nothing more! Besides he is always thinking to quit it shortly; which is a great sedative in troubles. What with intermittencies (safe hidings in one's MARQUISAT, or vacant interlunar cave), with alternations of offence and reconcilement; what with occasional actual flights to Paris (whitherward Voltaire is always busy to keep a postern open; and of which there is frequent talk, and ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle

... much sleeping myself, so I proceeded to divest and relax under the sedative pull of my pipe. For about half an hour I creaked the comfortable rocker, and pondered on that old subject of fools and their money, and how it was that wise men like myself had so little of it. The solitudes and soliloquies of life appealed to me—especially with a nice bunch of fake crime hovering ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent

... partly responsible. The great drawing-room seemed to grow larger and more oppressive as the human wave receded, and the hostess fled at last with some relief to the narrower limits of her writing-room and the sedative influences of a cigarette. She was inclined to be sorry for herself; the triumph of the afternoon had turned out much as she had predicted at lunch time. Her idol of onyx had not been swept from its pedestal, but the pedestal itself had an air of being packed up ready for transport to some ...
— When William Came • Saki

... them forty shillings in Massachusetts new-tenor currency a month, instead of twenty-five, and ended with ordering for each man half a pint of rum to drink the King's health. Though potations so generous might be thought to promise effects not wholly sedative, the mutineers were brought to reason, and some even consented to remain in garrison till the next June. [Footnote: Shirley to Newcastle, ...
— A Half-Century of Conflict, Volume II • Francis Parkman

... down, a Volume of Voltaire—curious fascination that Frenchman had, for all his destructive irony!—a volume of Burton's travels, and Stevenson's "New Arabian Nights," he had pitched upon the last. He felt, that evening, the want of something sedative, a desire to rest from thought of any kind. The court had been crowded, stuffy; the air, as he walked home, soft, sou'-westerly, charged with coming moisture, no quality of vigour in it; he felt relaxed, tired, even nervy, and for once the loneliness of his ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... they cannot endure the storms of disaster that are wont to overtake them. A woman like Rita Sohlberg, with a seemingly urgent feeling for Cowperwood, was yet not so charmed by him but that this shock to her pride was a marked sedative. The crushing weight of such an exposure as this, the Homeric laughter inherent, if not indicated in the faulty planning, the failure to take into account beforehand all the possibilities which might lead to such a disaster, was too much for her to endure. She was stung ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser

... Cissie's appreciation was the sedative Peter needed. The relief of her laughter and her presence ran along his nerves and unkinked them, like a draft of Kentucky Special after a debauch. The curves of her cheek, the tilt of her head, and the lift of her dull-blue blouse at the bosom wove a great restfulness about Peter. ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling

... solution for injection, which equals one thirty-second grain of gold tribromide." This is an active tonic, powerful sedative and destroys the appetite or cravings for alcoholic stimulants; the medicine is to be taken regularly four or five times a day for several weeks until the alcohol is out of the system even though he may appear cured. This is a good remedy, but should ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter

... oracle unwillingly, with suffering and such a strain as it took me days to get over. I resisted, not as before, but yet desperately, trying with better knowledge to keep down the growing passion. I hurried to my room and swallowed a dose of a sedative which had been given me to procure sleep on my first return from India. I saw Morphew in the hall, and called him to talk to him, and cheat myself, if possible, by that means. Morphew lingered, however, and, before ...
— The Open Door, and the Portrait. - Stories of the Seen and the Unseen. • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant

... assented. He proposed bed and a sedative therein, declaring that his experience overnight could pronounce it good, and that it should be hot. So he led his tired old friend to the bedroom, asked dozens of questions, flurried a withdrawal of them, suggested the answers, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... alongside. Before reaching it, however, our friend gave signs of reviving animation, and as we could not foresee to what extent he might regain his activity, we dropped him astern, clear of the boat, fearing lest in floundering about he might stave in her broadside. In doing so, moreover, and by way of a sedative, I fired a charge of large shot at his head, the muzzle of the gun not being a yard from it; and yet the only effect produced, was a slight stupor of the intellectual faculties, evinced by a momentary state ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes

... the Legislature, that in that case I should give the Legislature the reasons why I suspected that the men holding up all report of the bill were holding it up for purposes of blackmail. The riot did not come off; partly, I think, because the opportune production of the chair-leg had a sedative effect, and partly owing to wise counsels from one or two of ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt

... the meeting Zachariah was alarmed. His wife was in great pain, and had taken next to nothing all day. Late as it was, he went for a doctor, who would give no opinion as to the nature of the disease then, but merely ordered her some kind of sedative mixture, which happily gave her a little sleep. Zachariah was a working man and a poor man. Occasionally it does happen that a working man and a poor man has nerves, and never does his poverty appear so hateful to him as when he has ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford

... to which humanity is heir; that it will prolong life, and that it is a wonderful stimulant. Ancient medical works make this statement, laying special emphasis upon its stimulating qualities. The drug does none of these things. Instead of being a stimulant, it comes closer to a sedative. This investigation set the author on the search for other herbs that now are or might be grown as an occupation. Then came the idea of a man who should grow these drugs professionally, and of the sick girl healed by them. "I could have gone to work and started a drug farm myself," remarks ...
— At the Foot of the Rainbow • Gene Stratton-Porter

... establishment, and once or twice a year it does her good to breathe the pure serene of Beacon Hill. During her absence it is my privilege to inquire into the ritual of housekeeping. I find it very sedative after the incessant excitement ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley

... he said. "This liquid is the most efficacious sedative known for the treatment of wounds, and is the most employed now. Doctors have taken six thousand years to discover that! Yes, six thousand years in ...
— Michael Strogoff - or, The Courier of the Czar • Jules Verne

... all the morning; so happy that I forgot my tonics, massage, and sedative tablets; but the doctor called at noon and spoke of the wonderful way in which my system responded to his ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin



Words linked to "Sedative" :   medicament, street drug, medication, glutethimide, medicine, chloral hydrate, Doriden, medicinal drug, sedate, drug of abuse



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