pastille

A pastille is a type of sweet or medicinal pill made of a thick liquid that has been solidified and is meant to be consumed by light chewing and allowing it to dissolve in the mouth. The term is also used to describe certain forms of incense. A pastille is also known as a troche, which is a medicated lozenge that dissolves like sweets. Origins The word pastille comes from the same origin as pastry, from the Latin word pastillus, for a lump of meal or grain, which was from panis, "bread". A pastille was originally a pill-shaped lump of compressed herbs, which was burnt to release its medicinal properties. Literary references to the burning of medicinal pastilles include the short story "The Birth-Mark" by Nathaniel Hawthorne, the poem "The Laboratory" by Robert Browning, and the novel Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. They are also mentioned in the novel McTeague by Frank Norris, when the title character's wife burns them to mask an unpleasant odor in the couple's rooms. In Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, "a half-filled package of violet pastilles" is among the items found in Joel Cairo's pockets. In Alexandre Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo, pastilles are used for the delivery of both medicine and poison. They were also widely used during the eighteenth century in Western cultures to take herbal curatives and medicines, which eventually were developed into sweets.