Don Marquis uses it in an archy poem. See http://www.donmarquis.com/readingroom/archybooks/maxims.html.

the old fashioned
grandmother who used
to wear steel rimmed
glasses and make
everybody take opodeldoc
has now got a new
set of ox glands and
is dancing the black bottom

Excellent! And that page has all manner of wonderful things, like:

prohibition makes you
want to cry
into your beer and
denies you the beer
to cry into

Don Marquis is always a good read. Thanks!

From your own reference on the right (Dal')

Have you ever smell camphor oil? If you did, you'd never forget. I'd loosely - and very subjectively - interpret thus addressing as to somebody annoying, irritating, an unpleasant surprise - opodel'dok, in other words.

And now we interrupt our proggramme, wish you the best new year ever, and return to the spectacular table and Italian sparkling wine (I know, but it was my son's present)

Happy NY, everyone!

Lucky you -- I didn't even get sparkling wine! (I think it's the first time in my adult life I've seen in the new year without any bubbly -- but I did have a nice cabernet sauvignon with the beef Stroganov, so I can't complain.) Happy New Year to you too!

Marvellous word! You may be interested to know that Gogol was not the only 19th century writer to have used it. I found this rather interesting article on Edgar Allan Poe's Literary Use of "Oppodeldoc" and Other Patent Medicines at the site of The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore.

In the very first page of Hasek's Good Soldier Svejk (at least in the Finnish translation) it is told that Svejk applied Opodeldok ointment to his knees when his landlady Mrs Müller came to tell him the news that Ferdinand has been killed.

Isn't it reasonably clear that the intended meaning is something like "Oh, you Stick-in-the-mud Johnson!"?

Well, sort of, but I'm not entirely clear how you get 'stick-in-the-mud' from opodeldoc. But then perhaps you'd have to ask a Russian of the 1830s, or even Gogol himself, to know for sure.

I let out a bellow of rage at the perfidy of the lexicographers who had taken the easy way out, refusing to give the user the slightest actual help, requiring an additional trip to the OED.

Use Lingvo much? I use it for quick checks of words when I'm translating, and I become enraged every time I happen to paste in a perfective verb and the only thing listed in the entry is "pfv. of [imperfective form of the verb]".

As for New Years, I had champagne with a scoop of lime sherbet, which was a new one for me. ;-)

Have you considered asking a native Russian speaker?

Not being one, I looked in my Academy Tol'kovj Slovar' and found not the word. Nor is it in the recent Kuznetsov, which goes from opoganit'sja to opodlet' which means "stat' podlim ili poldee."

Consider it a Russian malapropism. The character is misuing the word, using hifalutin speach.
Or a pun.

A number of native speakers read LH, including Tatyana, who guessed (above) that it referred to "somebody annoying, irritating, an unpleasant surprise." That's probably as close as we're going to come. As for dictionaries, the word is too out of date for the ones you're looking in; you need Dahl for this kind of thing.

See http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opodeldok

How about 'Old Man Ivanovich'.

It was a cure/relief for rheumatism.

Still in contemporary usage, sort of. See 'Der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod'. Chapter on 'Stop Making Sense'. Probably also available on the Zwiebelfisch web page.

Opodeldok is mentioned in the Czech original of Hasek's Good Soldier Svejk (Osudy dobreho vojaka Svejka) as well. The name of the medicine is very well-known in the Czech republic (I'm Czech), not that is used in today's medical praxis;), but almost every Czech knows this passage (among other famous ones) from Sve

For me opodeldoc is a stinking substance of questionable character and effect.