Dear WO'N: My father had such a patient. He also had a patient who took them orally, and complained "For all the good they did me, I might just as well have shoved them up "where the sun never shines."
Speaking of patients taking medications the wrong way. One holiday when several other interns were out sick and I was ;having to cover for them, I had to see a teenage girl who was a private patient, who was being discharged with a vaginal douche of some horribly corrosive stuff. I asked her if she knew how it was to be used, and she said she did. Because I was in a hurry, I did not ask her to repeat the instructions. She went home and drank some of it. Mirabile dictu, she did not get a stricture of the esophagus. There is a special Providence.