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
It came in a lovely pot. 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.
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.
This is a kind of anti-Rohypnol advert from 1909. It’s a product that you surreptitiously slip into the unaware’s drink in order to sober them up.
“No More Drunkenness” is promised with “the Great Coza Powder”, which has “the marvellous effect of producing a repugnance to alcohol in any shape or form.”
Hull Daily Mail, 14th January 1909
The USP for this product is that the user isn’t aware that they’ve taken it. It’s for other concerned members of the drunkard’s family for administer in “coffee, tea, milk, beer, water, liqueurs or solid food, without the partaker’s knowledge”.
The troublesome imbiber suddenly doesn’t fancy a drink anymore as the powder “does its work so silently and surely that wife, sister, or daughter can administer it to the intemperate without his knowledge and without his learning what has effected his reformation.”
I’m not sure exactly how it works – you can get a free sample sent out to you, so it’s obviously not a one shot deal. Maybe you have to take it every day.
Annoying as the drunkard is, I suppose it’s not technically moral behaviour to secretly slip them some Coza Powder. Or it wouldn’t be if this remedy wasn’t pure quackery, and easily made in your kitchen right now. One of my favourite publications, The British Medical Journal’s “The Composition of Certain Secret Remedies” of 1909, the very same year as this advert, was a take down of the old Victorian and Edwardian pharmaceutical industry with analyses of all those “never fail” medications. It dismisses Coza by its findings that all it consists of is ordinary bicarbonate of soda, cumin and cinnamon.
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
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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
A double page advert celebrating the “thirty-third season” of Owbridge’s. The Yorkshire Post, 1908
“Please remember we can produce originals of all these letters”: 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
Emphasizing the honey in this advert (rather than the chloroform): 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
“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
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.
The trenches of the First World War were pretty hellish – and made worse by the fact that you were also likely to become infested with lice – “Our soldiers greatest enemy in the trenches.” So here’s a cure for them advertised in the local newspapers at the time. The adverts are directed towards family members to buy for their soldiers and then post them to the trenches. It’s “Somerville’s Asiatic Body Cord”, which apparently “Exterminates all body lice and prevents them lodging on the person or underclothing.” Lanarkshire Daily Record, 9th October 1915
The lice were the potential cause of huge problems. Apart from the irritation of the bites, they could also carry typhus and other diseases. The “Asiatic Body Cord” was based on an Indian folk medicine cure. It consisted of a woollen cord tied around the waist, and which was impregnated with 2 parts mercury ointment and 1 part beeswax. The mercury ointment was presumably toxic to the lice, but it could also be toxic to the soldier too with prolonged use. “The skin absorbs its germicide properties, and these are carried to all parts of the body” says one advertisement, which isn’t great if the germicide is mercury. Daily Mirror, 9th May 1916
At the height of production, 120,000 body cords were produced per year. Edinburgh Evening News, 18th December 1916
“Far superior and more effective than any insect-powder”, the advert says in relation to what was probably its main rival – Keating’s Powder, as well as Maw’s Antiverm Trench Powder. Edinburgh Evening News, 8th July 1916
“Keating’s Powder” was a more long-standing insect powder, used in Victorian kitchens too to rid the house of beetles and the like. This advert implies the fact that it’s been around a while with its “Business as usual!!-Beetles as usual!!-Killed as usual!!” It contained pyrethrum, an insecticide found in chrysanthemum flowers. Dundee Courier, 5th May 1915
Oh, I can’t resist the many ways constipation and laxatives were referenced in advertising. It was apparently a big problem in the early half of the twentieth century – although this doesn’t really tally with the received wisdom that everyone was busy eating loads of vegetables and not being fat.
We’ve had stiff upper lip chiding of constipation sufferers and skin constipation, now here’s “Exhaustipation”. Solved by “Carter’s Little Liver Pills” in case you were wondering.
