Gilda Radner’s book “It’s Always Something” describes a procedure where they unclogged her system by putting a tube weighed with a condem of mercury on the end of it up her nose and through her digestive system. Only the condem gets unattached and is not on the tube when it’s pulled out of her nose. So she does pass the condem and mercury the next day.
Read the book for a detailed description that definitely answers the question.
C’mon, can’t you just tell us?
I’m not worried about Uranus, just the ring around it.
Well, u’d probably burn ur anus before you were even able to ingest Mercury, because it’s so close to the sun… you’d assumedly have to be very close to the sun in order to eat it.
I think the dangers of mercury (the element and not the planet) are greatly overstated. I’m not suggesting in the least that anyone ingest mercury. However, it’s ridiculous when entire schools get shut down for a few days and a haz-mat team has to be brought in because an old mercury barometer broke.
As some may know, I built my own mercury barometer and have lived to tell about it.
Here’s a good cite written by a professor at the University of Denver. He’s got a PhD in chemistry and he believes elemental mercury’s dangers are overexaggerated.
http://www.du.edu/~jcalvert/phys/mercury.htm
IIRC mercury wil lodge in the bottom of the stomach and low places in the intestines IF it get that far. It is likely to perferote the stomach also.
As it that isn’t bad enough you can get mercury poisoning in an ongoing process!
The nice folks at NIOSH state the IDLH level for Hg to be 2 mg/m^3, so I wouldn’t do a shooter of it. 
You may be surprised to learn that mercury (in the form of both organic and inorganic compounds) has long been used as a diuretic to treat things such as edema (swelling), heart failure, etc. It is actually reasonably effective in this regard.
You may be more surprised to learn mercury containing compounds were used in this fashion quite widely until the 1960’s :eek:
Although I can’t get the text of these articles off the net, it is somewhat distressing to see that mercurials were still the subject of review articles, in “good” journals as recently as 1966.
I believe mercuric ore (cinnabar) was used as a treatment for syphilis back in the days of yore. Often it cured the disease only for the patient to die from mercury poisoning later (I want to say they bathed in it while it was warmed but I could be wrong).
that reaction depends on the oxidation potential of the metal. Mercury is too unreactive to react with the HCl in your stomach
I wouldn’t say it’s dangerous. It just that afterwards his always running off somewhere and won’t stay around for a cuddle
On the other hand he does send flowers.
Wasn’t drinking mercury a custom in certain baltic-area countries? i belive the latvians used to drink mercury…why, I have no idea!
I’d be concerned about Klingons, myself…
Calomel was a plot point in a Perry Mason episode back in the mid-1960s, IIRC. Some guy had been taking calomel pills and then died. Perry Mason was able to get his client acquitted because he proved someone else had murdered the guy by slipping him lemonade or something with his calomel, causing a reaction that produced toxicity or something. I don’t remember exactly, but they did get the point across that calomel was an old-fashioned remedy that no one really used any more.
Yeah, you don’t wanna let Klingons probe Uranus. It’s improctocal and Mogh trouble than ncessary.
Yup. I don’t know about the swimming, but mercury (“quicksilver”) was prescribed as a cure for syphilis back in Victorian times.
According to a passage in a book I was reading last night (Neal Stephenson’s ‘System of the World’), people with syphilis would carry around bottles of quicksilver to ingest.
I’ve had fantasies as long as I can remember of sitting in (well, on, really) a pool filled with mercury. I wonder what it’d feel like? Would it float you so well that you could sorta walk in it?
I can produce a much better shadow puppet of a seal using my fingers than I can with my anus. Perhaps your anus is more talented than mine.