Medicine: Velvet Tongue

Many a patient who takes penicillin in lozenges or sprays shows a marked discoloration of the tongue; most U.S. doctors have blamed the disease rather than the cure. Following up the work of doctors in Britain and India, Dr. Samuel A. Wolfson of Los Angeles came to a different conclusion: he showed that penicillin itself causes blackening of the tongue, may even cause the growth of black “hairs” up to half an inch long. Fortunately, the disorder clears up automatically after penicillin treatment is ended.

In the current Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr. Wolfson describes a woman’s tongue which had turned brownish-black; the tips of the taste buds had grown long and hairlike, and “bent like the nap of wet, heavy velvet when stroked with a tongue blade.”

Nobody knows how penicillin causes this reaction, nor why it is seldom, if ever, observed when the drug is given in the form of injections.