Well you do know the cause of unconsciousness in those cases. I meant not use them indiscriminately upon finding an unconscious person. Maybe I’m mistaken but I recall the reaction to smelling salts as part of diagnosing a vegetative state… and here it was easy to find in the end (bolding mine):
Here is a compilation of NHL players snorting smelling salts from a couple of years ago.
Hubs passes out every time he gets a shot. Doesn’t matter if he can see the needle or not, he faints as soon as his skin is punctured.
We warn the shot givers first and if I don’t have a popper in my hand when they start to prep him, everything stops until I do.
They wake him the heck up as well as everyone else in the room.
Recovery time is maybe a few seconds but besides the stink, we all get over it really quickly.
Vapors for vapours? 
But don’t use them in nebulizers. That would be bad.
Vapors for vapours, not vapers.
I remember them. My grandmother always had a bottle of them. They were by Yardley, and in a jar, not in a breakable glass capsule, as indicated above. Here’s what Grandmother had:
I don’t know why she had them, as she lived alone, and if she fainted, there would be nobody to administer them. I can only guess that they were a part of any proper lady’s belongings on her vanity, whether used or not.
Yes, I tried sniffing them. It was like getting a roundhouse kick in the head from a kung-fu master. If you weren’t awake before then, you sure were after. My gosh, the ammonia was enough to wake the dead, and send them running.
Well, as we all know, women in Victorian novels are prone to sudden death from all kinds of seemingly benign agues.
I prefer a bit of brandy.
My unadorned true smelling salts story:
One summer when I was 15 and working at a New England camp, the tip of my right index finger was nearly severed off in an accident. The camp nurse took me on an emergency trip to Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center where I was duly stitched up. At the end of the procedure, the doc told the camp nurse, “bring her back in 3 weeks so we can evaluate.”
Three weeks later I showed up at the camp infirmary, ready to be taken to Dartmouth-Hitchcock and evaluated. Instead, the nurse took a cursory look at my finger and briskly said, “we don’t need to go back to the medical center, you’re fine. I’ll just take the stitches out myself.”
In retrospect that was a sensible plan, but as an inexperienced youth that scared me. I imagined that the nurse felt gleeful/sadistic at the prospect of taking out my stitches.
So she began yanking out the stitches and in my terror and squeamishness, I slumped over as I began to slip from light-headedness to a full-on faint.
The nurse waved smelling salts under my nose and OH MY GOD WIDE AWAKE NOT AT ALL FAINT YES MA’AM SO THAT’S WHAT SMELLING SALTS ARE.
It was such a distinctive, alertness-inducing experience that I’ve never forgotten it. I didn’t need to ask, “what the hell was that?” I wasn’t expecting smelling salts - I didn’t even know if they were a real thing or just something that only existed in Victorian era novels - but I knew immediately that smelling salts are real and that I’d just experienced them.
I’m just trying to figure out what you are saying. You report the same experience with smelling salts as everyone else yet for some reason you stated that smelling salts were bullshit. Did the odor not shock your olfactory senses like everyone else? Did that not give you a surge of energy? Surely you didn’t just stand there motionless when that smell hit your nose. What part is bullshit?
If you are under the impression the salts are supposed to give you the kind of adrenaline surge that allows you to pick up a car then I suppose you’d be disappointed. That surge is what an athlete needs, not an increase in strength but an increase in focus. A weightlifter gets their strength from training, but losing focus will have a great detrimental effect on their lifting ability. This is the case for virtually all sports.
88From 14 years old I attended a Boarding school. Every Sunday we were bussed to a church well known for its heavy use of incense. During the service we had to kneel for 20 minutes and every week after 7-10 minutes I would crash to the floor unconscious.
When I told my grandfather he wandered off to the “back room” and returned with a crusty old jar of Yardley’s Lavender Smelling Salts. We decided to make it half strength as it still had the kick of a 'roo.
So when I started to go into pre-faint zone I’d have a sniff and stay vertical, Later it was found that my blood pressure was very low when I was not moving. I am here to say,it does work!
As for the swooning ladies…don’t forget most were wearing corsets which were laced tightly so that their abdominal organs were forced into their chest cavity, NOT a good way to try to breathe.
You might be joking with that Victorian list. It is pretty funny. However, to this day people sometimes die of Night Brain and The Unpleasantness. Sometimes both, if they have been strolling in negative environments sipping fortified wine.
Smelling salts were around 30+ years ago.
I have two kids, 2-1/2 years apart. The first one was born in SCal, the second one in Germany.
After giving birth, you are taken back to your room, and then almost immediately encouraged to go to the restroom. With great help (both times), I made it to the facilities. Once seated upon the throne, I passed out, both times! Apparently, that is just something I do, but only on such an occasion. I never was able to test that theory, as I only had the two kids.
Both times, somebody shoved one of those ammonia capsules under my nose. Both times, my immediate reaction was to windmill my arms trying to bat that nasty smell away from me!
One nurse told me later, “You have a strange way of fainting. Most people have a moment or two of looking or acting odd, kind of forewarning. You just turn completely white and pass out.”
Note: stretching me out flat on the floor to let me recover from the faint was not an option available.
~VOW
I went to the school nurse with bad cramps and she gave them to me. Made me sneeze.
I have ammonia containing stuff for cleaning glass and mirrors. I get the sense it is more like the overpowering smell I remember from occasional public pool swimming lessons.
When i was 12 years old, i received a severe concussion in a surfing accident. I was unable to stay conscious for several hours after the accident. I remember being rudely awakened on the way to the hospital with ammonia ampules waved under my nose. Very uncomfortable, especially when you are feeling the effects of a mild traumatic brain injury.
I pretty old now, but, when I was a lad, my Dad paid me to run a corn-fertilizer applicator. I did it only a couple of days, but the memory is still vivid.
The fertilizer compound was straight liquid anhydrous ammonia. Handling it was slightly dangerous. I was duly warned and instructed in safety procedures, such as, “Run away … upwind.” Nothing untoward happened to me, but the smell was … stimulating.
Liquid ammonia is used in large-scale refrigeration in building-sized installations. Workers need to be told what to do in case of a leak, and face masks have to be within reach at all times.
Liquid ammonia is used as fertilizer on certain crops, too. We applied it in cornfields. Using it outdoors is a lot less dangerous than indoors because the breeze (if any) dissipates it.
Ammonia boils way below normal temperatures, so, at atmospheric pressure, the liquid is really cold. One of the risks is that you splash it on your skin. This causes instant freeze burns. For this reason you put on big, thick, floppy rubber gloves before turning any valves.
The other risk is that you get a lungful of the vapor undiluted by the air. Aside from being suffocating, the vapor is caustic to the lining of the lungs. Taking a breath of it may be your last. And farm workers do, from time to time, succumb.
The agri-chemical company delivered a nurse tank to the field where I worked, and we rented an applicator from them. Here is how that works.
The nurse tank is, of course, under pressure from liquid ammonia near outdoor temperature. It is continually vented to relieve the pressure and to cool it. This releases a plume of invisible ammonia gas, which you want to stay out of. It’s not real hard to do that because the vent pipe is overhead, but you can get a good strong whiff every now and then to remind you to be careful.
The applicator tank is vented while not in use. To transfer ammonia from the nurse tank to the applicator, you close the vent on the nurse tank and open the vent on the applicator. There is no pump. The pressure in the nurse tank pushes the ammonia from the nurse tank to the applicator. Then you unhook the hose from the nurse tank to the applicator, being very careful not to get your face close to the open ends as the liquid in the valves boils away. Remember (This is important!) to open the vent on the nurse tank after you’re done. Close the vent on the applicator to pressurize it, and you’re set to go.
At the beginning of each trip through the field, the knives on the applicator dig into the ground to inject the liquid ammonia, which binds instantly with the soil. Once they do this, there is not supposed to be any leakage that you can smell. However, at the beginning and end of the trip as the knives are lowered and lifted, there can be some leakage from remaining liquid boiling out. If the breeze just matches your speed and direction through the field, the cloud of dilute ammonia follows you longer than you can hold your breath.
It was a grizzly job for me. My skin crawled, doing it, and it crawls now, thinking about it. I didn’t do it enough to become blase about it like those who make a career out of that kind of seasonal employment.
It is good that ammonia smells so strongly, that way you will (hopefully) notice it before it reaches a dangerous concentration.
As for swimming pools, perhaps they are doing something wrong if there is an overpowering smell of ammonia or chloramine.
The purpose of smelling salts is to use a sharp and painful odor to arouse someone who is unconscious. It only works if they aren’t deeply unconscious (yes, there are different levels of unconsciousness). People see this and think “aha, it perks people up like coffee, it must be a stimulant!”. But it’s really not, no more than stubbing your toe or popping a balloon behind someone’s head.
The reason people are saying it’s bullshit is that there’s almost never a good medical reason to forcibly rouse someone who’s unconscious. It’s a brief, strong insult to the senses, nothing more than that.
It makes sense for specific things like boxers, because they’re expected to take a beatings that make them woozy, and they need to be able to perk back up and keep fighting. But medically speaking there’s almost never a good reason for that kind of treatment.
They can also be used to prove someone is faking unconsciousness, as seen about one minute into this video:
