Sugar got its start as Dr. Tastegood

Sugar was once a rare and expensive medicine, and for a long timeyou'd buy it by prescription at an apothecary's shop.

Apart from their belief that sugar had laxative and stimulantproperties, doctors noticed that if a medicine tasted really vile,sweetening made it easier to swallow. "A little sugar makes the dosego down," as the saying goes.

So some old-fashioned candies were originally prescriptiondrugs, as it were. One, rare in the United States but still commonenough in England, is the oddly named barley sugar, which used to beprescribed for …