Categories
Pharmaceuticals Victorian

Bad Breasts, 1872

I do love an advert for a Victorian “cure-all”. Here we have Holloway’s Ointment in an advert from 1872.

It claims to cure (deep breath) – coughs, colds, bronchitis, asthma, irregular action of the heart, bad legs, bad breasts, ulcers, abscesses, wounds, sores of all kinds, “the depraved humours of the body will be quickly removed”, gout, rheumatism, neuralgic pains, “skin diseases, however desperate, radically cured”, scald heads, itch, blotches on the skin, scrofulous sores or king’s evil, dropsical swellings, paralysis, burns, bunions, chilblains, chapped hands, corns, contracted and stiff joints, fistula, gout, glandular swellings, lumbago, piles, sore nipples, sore throats, scurvy, sore heads, tumours and ulcers.

Bedfordshire Mercury, 2nd November 1872
Bedfordshire Mercury, 2nd November 1872

It came in a lovely pot.

Holloway's Ointment
Holloway’s Ointment

Thomas Holloway, the founder of Holloway’s Ointment, died in 1883 as one of the richest men in England. At that point Holloway’s were spending an incredible £50,000 a year on advertising the products, but unsurprisingly, contemporary analysis of the ointment showed that it contained little of medicinal value.

Categories
1900-1949 Adverts Pharmaceuticals Victorian

Girl Goes Silly, 1923

Cannabis was made illegal in the UK in 1928 for general use, although you could grow your own marijuana plants until 1964, and doctors were still able to prescribe cannabis for medical purposes until 1971. That year The Misuse of Drugs Act brought in the classification of dangerous drugs as either A, B or C – cannabis was class B, then briefly class C between 2004 and 2009, only to bounce back to B from 2009 onwards.

In the nineteenth century, though, it was a different story. You could find many pharmaceutical adverts for cannabis-containing remedies, such as Grimault’s cannabis cigarettes for asthma. Strange as the idea of smoking to help asthma may seem, this isn’t a medical treatment relegated to the past. The benefits or otherwise of using cannabis as a way of relieving asthma are being debated vociferously right now across the Internet, with official medical sites advising that smoking cannabis is a Bad Idea, versus vast numbers of cannabis-friendly blogs stating the exact opposite.

Bedfordshire Mercury, 2nd November 1872
Bedfordshire Mercury, 2nd November 1872

Then there was cannabis to help cure corns.

Hull Daily Mail, 3rd July 1888
Hull Daily Mail, 3rd July 1888

And a recipe to make your own at home. The other main ingredient was salicylic acid, still used in corn remedies now, minus the marijuana.

Leicester Chronicle, 16th December 1911
Leicester Chronicle, 16th December 1911

In 1923 The Motherwell Times reported on an interesting story which had been written up in the British Medical Journal. Under the wonderful headline of GIRL GOES “SILLY”, it tells the tale of a young man who induced two teenage Shrewsbury sisters to “sniff up the dusty tobacco at the bottom of his pouch”. This was “a foolish joke” on his part.

The older sister was sick, while the younger one became “frankly intoxicated. She was taking incoherently, and giggling in a fatuous manner.” The reason for this became clearer when analysis revealed that cannabis was mixed in with the tobacco dust. Its inclusion is presented in an almost inconsequential way, however, with the doctor’s conclusion being only that tobacco must have a much stronger effect when it was snorted rather than smoked. The fatuous laughing though, well, I think maybe that wasn’t entirely the tobacco’s fault.

Motherwell Times, 28th September 1923
Motherwell Times, 28th September 1923

One thing which startles me is that the girl is reportedly oblivious to her surroundings “unless well shaken“, which makes me imagine the whole scene as basically this:

Categories
1900-1949 Adverts Pharmaceuticals

Phyllosan Fortifies the Over-Forties, 1946

As one of the “over-forties” myself, here’s a reminder that this age used to be considered as pretty much the start of your dotage. Special tablets were required to keep up your energy, and Phyllosan marketed itself directly to this demographic.

Phyllosan contained ferrous fumarate to help increase your iron intake, and vitamins B1, B2 and C. It appears to still be available (perhaps on prescription?) as I found an information leaflet for the drug online, dated 2011.

Gloucester Journal, 2nd November 1946
Gloucester Journal, 2nd November 1946
Categories
1900-1949 Pharmaceuticals

Mummy Dust, 1904

At a gig in Manchester recently, watching my new favourite band, Ghost, singing their song “Mummy Dust”, I started thinking about looking up powdered mummies on the British Newspaper Archive. The Archive starts mid-18th century and I thought vaguely that maybe the use of ground-up mummies as a gruesome kind of medicine had persisted into Victorian times.

Not that “Mummy Dust” is actually about mummies, I think it’s about the evils of money. Here’s Papa Emeritus III singing the song live, and really reminding me of another Papa, the League of Gentlemen’s Papa Lazarou. Is that Reece Shearsmith under the mask?

It turns out the Victorians were almost as fascinated and disbelieving at the existence of mummy medicine as we are, and they describe the bizarre sources of medicine from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries with delight. As well they might, as they sound indistinguishable from your classic witches brew, eye of newt, and all that.

In 1868, the imminent Pharmacy Act gave newspapers the chance to review these strange medicines of the past, this was the kind of quackery the Act was intended to guard against. A beautiful line, this – “Ancient Egyptians who could never agree with their wives, were expected, when pulverised and taken in preserves, to agree with the wives of other people. The living, to lengthen their own lives, made medicine of the dead.”

Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 4th September 1868
Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 4th September 1868

This piece from 1897 describes strange Elizabethan medicines as including “crabs’ eyes, dried spiders, powdered mummy, wolfs’ liver, [and] dried toads.”

Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper, 28th February 1897
Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 28th February 1897

And here’s mention of “spider pills” for jaundice – a live spider covered in butter and rolled into a ball, then swallowed. As well as newborn puppies, tiger flesh, and viper broth to improve the eyesight. For careless women, try the herb Solomon’s seal, good for clearing up the bruises caused by “women’s wilfulness in tumbling upon their hasty husbands’ fists.” And of course, the powdered mummy, too popular for its own good – “so great was the demand that more mummies were supplied than ever came out of Egypt.”

Cheltenham Chroncicle, 17th May 1913
Cheltenham Chroncicle, 17th May 1913

The ancient mummies of Egypt were held in high regard, at least in terms of the almost magical effect they might imbue. Not in high enough regard that they weren’t disrespectfully ground to dust to be used by apothecaries and necked, cannibalistically, by the wealthy. Demand was so high that over time new mummies were made, from criminals or other unclaimed bodies, to keep the supply up.

The Sportsman, 14th December 1870
The Sportsman, 14th December 1870

They were also held in high regard as a potent source of manure. Trade in mummified cats for this purpose seemed profitable. This correspondent is shocked that ancient cat dust reached a price of £5 17s 6d per ton. “Only think of it! The dust of Julius Caeser himself would not be worth anything like that money.”

Taunton Courier, 19th February 1890.
Taunton Courier, 19th February 1890.

And with all this dust flying around, it was even suggested (although hardly taken seriously) that the scourge of influenza was caused by all these dead Egyptians.

Aberdeen Evening Express, 1st February 1892
Aberdeen Evening Express, 1st February 1892

And yet, despite marvelling at the strangeness of mummy medicine, the Victorians were still using powdered mummy themselves in an even odder way than the manure trade. It was almost hidden in plain sight. I came across this little article on paint manufacturers in 1904, and disbelieved it immediately. Surely it couldn’t really be the case that “…almost every manufacturer of pigments has a mummy department”?  That mummies were ground up, mixed with poppy oil and sold as “a beautiful brown” paint?

London Daily News, 24th February 1904
London Daily News, 24th February 1904

But, strangely, it was true. When I say “hidden in plain sight”, I mean that it wasn’t an obvious secret – in fact, the name of this pigment was actually “Mummy Brown”. A bit of a giveaway, you might think. But, much like you don’t expect a tube of “Burnt Sienna” oil paint to contain fragments of a spontaneously human combusted Sienna Miller, not many people seemed to realise that “Mummy Brown” wasn’t just a descriptor of a burnished, dusty, earthy sepia paint. The London Daily News certainly saw the information as “startling” in 1904, and Mummy Brown had been used for around 400 years and already graced the paintings of many of the Pre-Raphaelites by then.

Mummy Brown was reported a few times in the papers, but generally always as a new, strange titbit of curiosity.

Dundee Evening Telegraph, 18th September 1891
Dundee Evening Telegraph, 18th September 1891

The paint was first made in the 16th century, at the same time that powdered mummy became popular as a medicine. Along with the mummy dust, it originally contained white pitch and myrrh and was a popular pigment for some time as its transparency made it versatile. It was often used for flesh tones. It wasn’t just human mummies that made up Mummy Brown, there were an awful lot of mummified cats in the plundered tombs of Egypt, and they were ground up too.

I found this mention from 1893 – apparently many of those who even knew that the paint was made from mummies had thought that they weren’t of the human variety. “From the mummies of ancient Egypt is manufactured a paint called “mummy brown”, and although it was alleged for some time that the mummies employed for this purpose were those of birds and beasts, an osteologist who interested himself in the subject found in some of the “raw stuff” imported from Egypt, certain bones which were undoubtedly human.

Dover Express, 8th December 1893
Dover Express, 8th December 1893

Apparently over the course of the 19th century the exact nature of the paint became better known to artists, and so it became less used as a result, although evidently the message hadn’t reached everyone. There’s a great story about the time that the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones found out just what Mummy Brown was. The artist Lawrence Alma-Tadema had been invited to lunch with the Burne-Jones family, the party including a young Rudyard Kipling, a nephew of Burne-Jones. Talking shop, the two artists were discussing the paints they used. Alma-Tadema told Burne-Jones of an invitation he’d had from a paint-maker to see a mummy before it was ground down for use in his Mummy Brown paint. Burne-Jones couldn’t believe that the paint was really made from the dead – he used that shade and had thought it referred only to the colour. Once convinced it was true, he rushed to his studio, grabbed his tube of Mummy Brown, dug a hole in the ground, buried it and gave it a funeral, there and then.

This story, and pretty much anything else you might want to know about Mummy Brown, can be found in this marvellous post – The Life and Death of Mummy Brown.

The discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb in 1922 put mummies and Ancient Egypt back in the spotlight and inspired an array of beautiful Art Deco designs. An interesting question is raised in this article about how much time has to pass before disturbing a grave isn’t an act of desecration. And the paper’s readers are told of Mummy Brown – “Until quite recently Egyptian mummies were actually being ground up by artists’ colourmen and used for making paint called “mummy brown.”

Cornishman, 28th February 1923
Cornishman, 28th February 1923

I’m not sure when Mummy Brown properly ceased to be, when the ashes to ashes, dust to dust and dust to paint finally ended. But it was still sold until the 1920s or 30s by the colour-makers Roberson’s of London. Incredibly, the firm’s managing director confirmed as late as 1964 that they’d finally used up all their mummies. He said, “We might have a few odd limbs lying around somewhere, but not enough to make any more paint. We sold our last complete mummy some years ago for, I think, £3. Perhaps we shouldn’t have. We certainly can’t get any more.”

Categories
1900-1949 Adverts Pharmaceuticals

Stale Foot Acid, 1939

It feels like there’s always something new to be body-conscious about. A new zone that hair should be entirely removed from or else some hidden part of the body that now, apparently, should be bleached. Of course, there’s always the accompanying new products marketed to solve our problems before we even knew they were problems.

Well, it was always this way. Just like Skin Constipation tried to become a “thing” in 1937, “Stale Foot Acid” was the new thing to worry about in 1939. It was basically the same thing – clogged pores which could be cured by, well, having a good wash.

Daily Herald, 1st March 1939
Daily Herald, 1st March 1939

 

Here’s the (not-so) science bit – the sweat from your feet, left to become “stale”, turns to acid, blocks up all the pores in your feet and then starts piling up in the muscles, resulting in corns, callouses, stabbing pains, burning and tingling.

“You’ve got to shift that acid or go on suffering!”

So, what can be done to alleviate this dreadful condition? The “modern treatment” is to bathe your foot daily in water with Radox bath salts added. Radox is the best bath salt to use because it “liberates about five times as much oxygen as other bath salts.” Somehow, this “supercharges” the bath water and lets the acid escape through the now unblocked pores. Hooray!

And as a bonus, you now also don’t have people fainting at the vinegary stench when you take your shoes off.

 

Categories
1950-1999 Adverts Pharmaceuticals

Wake Up Your Liver Bile, 1950

Who among us can say with confidence that their liver is freely pouring out two pints of liquid bile into their bowels daily? For those in doubt (and living in 1950), there’s Carters Little Liver Pills. The very next year, Carter had to drop the “liver” from their name in the US as the Federal Trade Commission found that while they were an “irritative laxative” (with one of their ingredients described as “drastic”), they actually had “no medicinal effect on the liver”. I think you can still get Carters Little Pills in the US, but in the UK, Dulcolax is the modern version.

The mention of being “without Calomel” is reassuring. Despite the appealing-sounding name (which could derive from the Greek words for “beautiful” and “honey” due to its sweet taste), Calomel is actually mercury chloride. In the first half of the twentieth century it was used as a laxative, a disinfectant, a remedy for syphilis, and (anxiety-inducingly) as a teething powder for babies.

As you can imagine from a mercury compound, it was toxic. In the teething babies it could cause a type of mercury poisoning called “pink disease” which was painful and caused pink discolouration of the hands and feet. The mortality rate for pink disease was a horrifying 1 in 10. After discovery of the toxidity of the compound, it wasn’t used in teething powders after 1954.

Gloucester Citizen, 6th October 1950
Gloucester Citizen, 6th October 1950

 

WAKE UP YOUR LIVER BILE
Without Calomel – and you’ll jump out of your bed in the morning full of vim and vigour.

The liver should pour out two pints of liquid bile into your bowels daily. If this bile is not flowing freely, your food doesn’t digest. You get headaches and feel rotten. You get constipated. Your whole system is poisoned and you feel sour, slack and the world looks black.

Laxatives help a little, but a mere bowel movement doesn’t get at the cause. It takes those good old Carters Little Liver Pills to get those two pints of bile flowing freely and make you feel “up and up”. Harmless, gentle, yet amazing in making bile flow freely. Ask for Carters Little Liver Pills. Stubbornly refuse anything else. 1/7 and 3/10. Also new 3 1/2d. sizes.

Categories
1900-1949 Adverts Pharmaceuticals

Seigel’s Syrup, 1902

I was rather taken by this advert for Seigel’s Syrup. It’s from 1902, but the swirling shapes and squidgy font could easily fit in with the design on a 1960s music poster.

Nottingham Evening Post, 24th December 1902
Nottingham Evening Post, 24th December 1902

The book Patent Medicines and Secret Formula analysed branded pharmaceuticals and revealed the previously top-secret formula of Seigel’s Syrup consisted mainly aloe and borax. Aloe is still a very popular soothing ingredient of course, but Borax is more familiar to us now as an ingredient in cleaning products and insecticides. In fact, Wikipedia lists quite an interesting range of uses for borax – everything from mothproofing, making flames burn green, treatment for thrush in horses hooves, as a curing agent for snake skins and to clean the brain cavity of a skull for mounting. Useful stuff.

The text of that Patent Medicines book is fascinating. I especially like the particularly potent-sounding Grandmother’s Own Cough Remedy. That apparently involved rubbing liquid tar with hemlock (eek) and sugar, then adding alcohol and chloroform. I suppose the cough would be the least of your worries after that.

Categories
1900-1949 1950-1999 Adverts Pharmaceuticals Victorian

More Owbridge’s Lung Tonic

Yorkshire Telegraph, 2nd February 1905
Yorkshire Telegraph, 2nd February 1905

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from this blog (well, there’s a ton of things I’ve learned, in fact, everyday is a school day here) it’s that there’s an awful lot of people still interested in Owbridge’s Lung Tonic. My last post on the subject here is one of my most popular pages. It’s really a rare day that there’s no hits on that post, which I wasn’t anticipating at all. As far as I was concerned, it was one of those pharmaceuticals lodged firmly in the past, like the mercury-containing Blue Pills of another post.

But Owbridge’s was a medicine that people obviously remember taking and are googling nostalgically for. And so I checked when it last was available, and I was surprised that production only ended in 1971 – no wonder so many people know of it still.

One thing I have to say – the British Medical Association’s “Secret Remedies” book of 1909 that I linked to in my previous post states that an analysis of Owbridge’s shows the medicine to contain ipecacuanha wine, honey and, alarmingly, a quantity of chloroform. But the formula did change again over the years and so the version that people had in the 1960s was (presumably) not the same as that analysed in 1909. Having said that, I haven’t found anything to state what exactly the last incarnation consisted of.

Still, for those Owbridge’s fans still out there (although it is apparently a love-hate kind of memory, I gather), here’s some more vintage adverts I’ve found.

Owbridge’s Lung Tonic. Owbridge’s Lung Tonic. Owbridge’s Lung Tonic.

The Northern Evening Mail, 1882
The Northern Evening Mail, 1882

It sounds like there was some dispute going on here between The Pharmaceutical Society and patent medicines. “No one has the right to attach poison labels” to Owbridge’s, it says. That wouldn’t have helped business.

The Aberdeen Journal, 14th January 1893
The Aberdeen Journal, 14th January 1893

A double page advert celebrating the “thirty-third season” of Owbridge’s.

The Yorkshire Post, 1908
The Yorkshire Post, 1908

“Please remember we can produce originals of all these letters”:

The Yorkshire Evening Post, 1910
The Yorkshire Evening Post, 1910

This 1914 typeface reminds me of the opening credits of a black and white “Carry On” film.

Daily Mirror, 2nd November 1914
Daily Mirror, 2nd November 1914

Emphasizing the honey in this advert (rather than the chloroform):

Yorkshire Evening Post, 19th January 1926
Yorkshire Evening Post, 19th January 1926

Finally, a celebration of the 80th anniversary in 1954. It was around for nearly 100 years, just missing the centenary in 1974.

The Luton News, 1954
The Luton News, 1954

Categories
Adverts Pharmaceuticals Victorian

Dr Ricord’s Essence of Life, 1851

“Dr Ricord’s Essence of Life” – there’s a product that promises a lot. Even going by the standard Victorian pharmaceutical predilection to claim that their medicine will cure half of the ailments in a medical dictionary.

Oxford University Herald, 21st September 1851
Oxford University Herald, 21st September 1851

It promises “The vigour of youth restored in four weeks” but what does that mean?

“This wonderful agent will restore manhood to the most shattered constitution, whether arising from self-pollution, excesses, nocturnal emissions, the effects of climate, or natural causes.”

OK, so it’s Victorian Viagra for those who’ve broken themselves with too much “self-pollution”?

“The time required to cure the most inveterate case is four weeks; and, if used according to the printed instructions (which are very simple), failure is impossible.” Of course, one thing that all Victorian pharmaceuticals seem to have in common is that they all “never fail”. Or, as this advert puts it, “Success in every case is as certain as that water quenches thirst.”

But hang on! What does it actually do? Because – “This life-restoring remedy should be taken by all about to marry, as its effects are permanent.” What “effects” are these? Is this why Prince Albert got a prince albert?

“It is acknowledged by the medical press to be the greatest discovery ever made.” Strangely, I can’t find any evidence of this.

Unfortunately, I can’t find any analysis of what was in this remedy – the British Medical Association’s Secret Remedies book doesn’t investigate that particular product, but maybe when that book was published, in 1909, it wasn’t available anymore.

Looking at other Dr Ricord’s adverts, which were widely placed in local newspapers over the 1850s and 1860s, they don’t often seem to mention the “self-pollution” and “nocturnal emissions” bits although the wording is otherwise the same. But then, this advert was in a university newspaper, so maybe this was a special student version.

Categories
1900-1949 Adverts Pharmaceuticals Victorian

Pink Pills for Pale People, 1917

“Dr Williams’ pink pills for pale people” – a gloriously named pharmaceutical that sounds to me equally likely to have come from the past or some kind of Philip K Dick-style future.

The Lancashire Daily Post, 16th November, 1917
The Lancashire Daily Post, 16th November, 1917

The pink pills were, however, quite a big deal around the late 19th and early 20th century. George Taylor Fulford bought the rights to the pills in 1890 and launched a huge marketing campaign for them, covering 87 countries and spending a dazzling £200,000 a year on advertising in 1900 – in Britain alone.

As the “pale people” description indicates, these were iron supplements for anaemic people. And unlike the wild claims of various cure-alls, these were genuinely medically helpful to many people, as anaemia was a common condition of the time.

A strange little postscript to the story is that George Fulford died from a car accident in 1905 – he, his chauffeur and his business partner Willis Hanson were ejected from their car as it collided with a streetcar in New York. This was not a common cause of death at this point in time, and indeed Fulford is reported by Wikipedia to be the first Canadian on record to die by automobile accident.