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Rub a Dub

A mystery solved. I've wondered over the years what the rubbing means in rubbing alcohol. Does anyone actually rub with it? I mean regular rubs, not the old rub and tug.
And then I forget again but today I remembered to look it up. People once rubbed with it, as a liniment for treating muscle pains, but it wasn't quite the same thing. The stuff was created in the 1920's, sometimes with ethanol and sometimes with isopropanol, but they were perfumed and had a number of other additives, notably methyl salicylate.
Methyl salicylate, when rubbed on the skin, causes a heating sensation similar to what happens with a product like Bengay (which, incidentally, is an Anglicized version of the French inventor's name, Bengue'). I have a hard time believing that a chemically induced sensation of heat is anywhere near the same thing as actual heat from a heating pad. It doesn't involve actual heating of the muscle tissues, just activation of heat sensitive neurons. I guess it is an example of the placebo effect.
At any rate, in addition to making you think you're being heated, methyl salicylate (also known as oil of wintergreen) is potentially toxic. One teaspoon contains 6 grams of salicylate, as much as 20 300mg aspirin tablets, and it is absorbed through the skin. Toxic ingestions occur at about 150 mg/kg of body weight but have been seen at as low as 100 mg/kg. For a 20 pound child, that is about 10 milliliters total dose, but toxic doses have been recorded as low as 4 milliliters. Not surprisingly, most examples of death due to methyl salicylate have been seen in small children, though there was a 17 year old cross country runner who died in 2007 due to excessive use of methyl salicylate containing liniments.
For that reason, over time, the additives were removed from the formulation until we reached the surgically pure antiseptic that we have today, but the name stuck

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