When Hume is invited to stay at his cousin Clara's as a part of her household's celebrations, he is shocked to be served slices of cold turkey on the evening of his arrival.
is that Hume's behavior towards Clara - excluding and excommunicating her in retaliation for her ongoing ill-treatment of him - became known as "the cold turkey treatment", and that word quickly spread from London to the rest of Britain, and finally the United States.
An early print appearance of "cold turkey" in its exclusionary sense dates to 1910, in Canadian poet Robert W. Service's The Trail of '98: A Northland Romance: "Once I used to gamble an' drink the limit.
[9] The term is also attributed to piloerection or "goose bumps" that occurs with abrupt withdrawal from opioids, which resembles the skin of a plucked refrigerated turkey.
[10] A term appears in its contemporary usage in a December 1920 New York City medical bulletin:[11] Some addicts voluntarily stop taking opiates and "suffer it out" as they express it without medical assistance, a process which in their slang is called taking "cold turkey"... Another early printed use, this one in the media to refer to drug withdrawal occurred in the Daily Colonist in British Columbia in 1921:[12]Perhaps the most pitiful figures who have appeared before Dr Carleton Simon ... are those who voluntarily surrender themselves.