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Fire Escape Partners
3465 25th Street, Suite 17
San Francisco, CA 94110 | (adjective)
[pie-RET-ik] 
1. of, relating to, or affected by fever; febrile: "A nasty flu bug had turned our office into a pyretic wasteland."
Origin:
Approximately 1858; borrowed from New Latin, 'pyreticus': feverish; from Greek, 'pyretos': fever, from 'pyr': fire (genitive 'pyros'). In action:
"But the gist of the suit would be the fact that the rhinoceros today is an endangered species, and its numbers are dwindling fast, especially when compared with those in the 1960s, when the play was written. Only 15,000 one-horned rhinos now live in Africa, about quarter of them black and the rest white; less than 2,800 of these rhinos, in three subspecies, live in Asia (India, Indonesia, Vietnam).
The main enemy of the rhino is the human - not only because people think (although it is scientifically unfounded) that ground-up rhino horn is an aphrodisiac. In addition, there are those who make cups out of the horns. It seems that the chemical make-up of the horns is such that certain poisons stain them and can be thus detected in time by the prospective poisonee. But the main threat to the rhino derives from practioners of Chinese medicine, who traditionally use the powder ground from its horns as an anti-pyretic."
Michael Handelzalts. "Dangerous, because endangered," Haaretz.com (February 27, 2004).
"Interestingly, there was an explosion of writing in French about cannabis following Napoleon's invasion of Egypt, but this tended to focus on the inebriating properties of hashish, creating the context for Baudelaire's decadent Fleurs du Mal poems. In Britain cannabis continued to be regarded as a benevolent therapeutic plant, capable of soothing pain, calming anxiety, promoting appetite and digestion and relieving both headaches and nervous convulsions. This view of the plant prevailed until well into the last century.
How did a herb which for centuries had been of therapeutic benefit in Indian, China, and Europe, and which early 20th-century English orthodox medicine summarised as an anti-pyretic, analgesic, anti-diuretic, anti-asthmatic, hypnotic, anti-anorectic, anti-emetic, and anti-convulsive muscle relaxant (BMA Report, 1997), come, fifty years later, to be classified as being 'of no therapeutic benefit', unavailable for use, inaccessible to research (Schedule 1 of the Misuse of Drugs Act, 1971)?"
Vivienne Crawford. "The 'homelie herbe': Vivienne Crawford examines the medicinal history of cannabis in Britain." History Today, (January 2002).
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