The past is dark and full of terrors

[mme_hardy]

 I was noodling around, as one does, and I stumbled over the Google Book of the  1911 book, The Composition of Certain Patent and Proprietary Medicines.   It does what it says on the tin, and boy, howdy.  Some highlights:

• Black Cloud Healing Mixture: Mercuric chloride 1 oz, oil of tar 1 gal, turpentine 1.5 oz, phenol 5 oz, wood alcohol 1 gal.  [Given the poisonousness of wood alcohol, this can't have been for internal consumption.  I'm guessing this might have been sold to treat syphilis chancres?  oursin  will know.]
• Blue Bell Bright Sunshine Tablets: corn starch, zinc phosphid, nux vomica [the plant from which you get strychnine], cantharides [Spanish fly], glycerin, damiana, and arsenic more than 1 part per hundred thousand.
• Boy's Friend: An antiseptic solution of zinc sulphate, boric acid, hydraxatin and lysol to be used as an injection.
• (This one's for legionseagle ) Carbolic Smoke Balls,  small round balls wrapped in red cloth.  The balls contain 310 grams of a gray powder consisting of glycorrhiza (licorice), and flour, one of the veratrums (probably white hellebore),  and an unidentified tar product.

Over and over you see "medicines" containing morphine, cocaine, or opium; mercury, lead, or zinc compounds; prussic acid; colloidal silver; strychnine; all invariably (if liquid) borne on a sea of alcohol.   Then there are things I find just plain odd: beef and steel tonics, three different celery tonics that don't actually contain celery; and, of course, laxatives in everything, even products not marketed as laxatives.

Wouldn't it be nice if the FDA were allowed to regulate supplements again?

Comments

[recessional]

At least the morphine/cocaine/opium ones would have some actual effect, period; the recipes listed here are just appalling. :O

[mme_hardy]

You should see the ones touted for morphine addiction cures, which contain ... wait for it ... morphine.

[recessional]

*opens mouth*

*closes mouth*

Okay then.

[adrian_turtle]

Some modern experts consider methadone a plausible treatment for opiate addiction, but the dose and timing have to be controlled carefully. (Just as nicotine patches treat tobacco addiction.) The problem is that none of these "make you less high, and let you taper off slowly without withdrawal" things won't help somebody who wants to continue using the addictive substance. Too many of the addiction cures were marketed as "Sneak this miracle elixir into your parent's coffee and they'll stop using Demon Whatever!" That trick never works.

[kore]

Yeah, I've known people who went off heroin only to claim they were then addicted by doctors to methadone, altho at least methadone can be administered in a semi-medical setting and isn't cut with God knows what and the required routine to show up and get it can provide some kind of structure, as opposed to the compulsiveness of copping. But I think it's useful more as a maintenance harm reduction thing than anything else. If methadone helps keep people off the streets and away from dirty needles and is part of a treatment program, that's good, but it doesn't really solve the underlying addiction problem.

[ironed_orchid]

Your icon is a thing of beauty.

[kore]

Thank you! It's this guy's artwork: http://bjornlie.tumblr.com/post/132796404950/did-this-botanical-drawing-for-todays-ny-times https://instagram.com/p/903ftwkWYr/

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

It's a bit like the nicotine patch -- if you can get rid of the day-to-day habits that you build up around smoking (which many people have done their whole adult lives), it can make a big difference even if you haven't yet kicked the physical addiction. That's of course even more important in the case of doing illegal drugs, where you need to re-learn how to have a life that's not about getting a fix. But I know from a relative's experience (thankfully now several decades in the past) that getting off methadone is not easy. I don't know what the modern experience is like. I hope there is better support now.

[kore]

Oh, yeah. IIRC, heroin was marketed as a safe synthetic non-addictive alternative to morphine. Sort of the same way methadone was then marketed as a safe non-addictive (ho ho) alternative to heroin later on. I think it was used til the nineteen-teens as an alternative to morphine as a cough suppressant.

[legionseagle]

You could get packages of morphine and heroin during WWI from the Army and Navy Stores, advertised as "a very acceptable gift for a loved one at the Front." Which is probably one of the most honest advertisements in recorded history.

[staranise]

I'm reminded of Florence Nightingale recommending that amateur nurses practice homeopathy, mostly because it was the only regimen that, with a home nurse's level of medical education, wouldn't at least make anything worse.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

That's what I used to think, figuring that either the manufacturers were true believers who diluted everything until it wasn't there any longer, or they were scammers who never bothered to use anything except fillers anyway. Then I heard of actual problems with belladonna toxicity in children who had consumed Hyland's teething tablets (probably in quantities greater than recommended, there being no child-proof cap, but in any case a bottleful shouldn't have been a problem if they'd been diluted as stated). So apparently some manufacturers are true believers who can't do math.

In general, though, Nightingale was probably right, considering how unsafe the alternatives were.

[nineveh_uk]

I dread to think what Blue Bell Bright Sunshine Tablets would do to you if any of the ingredients were in doses large enough to be effective.

I would assume that the beef and steel tonic is aimed at something along the lines of general lassitude or anaemia, and so possibly one of the less stupid ones.

[tree_and_leaf]

Is it supposed to be an aphrorodisiac, do you think? It sounds, as you say, like a seriously bad idea if taken in large doses.

Wiki claims that Spanish Fly is used in incense in the rites of Santeria. That can't possibly end well (unless, of course, it's used in pretty homeopathic levels).

[oursin]

A lot of patient medicines were sold as pretty much generically good for what ails you - I suspect that Black Cloud Healing Mixture was for a general range of skin conditions - very def not to be taken internally, I should think, with the turps and tar.

Steel also figures in 'women's pills' (often as apiol - parsley oil - and steel) i.e. abortifacients (or sold in the implication they were such: the pretty much contemporary Secret Remedies of the British Medical Association found that most of these were sugar pills with added bitters. In fact I think this UK version found that most patent medicines were similar scams.

Products put out by the most reputable pharma cos and prescribed by docs at that date (including the one the profits of which funded my late job) included cocaine, morphine etc (I may have noted that if you consider the contents of the medicine chest found in the Scott Expedition hut, they were probably all completely stoned).

[nineveh_uk]

So that's the real reason why the Norwegians got to the South Pole first?

[caulkhead]

Stoned, and with scurvy (as legionseagle pointed out, if *anyone* managed to get scurvy in the 20th century, it would be Scott).

[oursin]

Or they had the really good drugs.

Jon Snow, M.D.

[executrix]

It's not just the distant past, though. Diethyl stilbestrol was widely prescribed to pregnant women as a "hold the baby in pill," and HRT was prescribed to prevent the kind of heart damage it actually caused.

I think it was Voltaire who said that doctors prescribe medications, about which they know little, to treat diseases, about which they know less, in people, about whom they know nothing?

Re: Jon Snow, M.D.

[oursin]

I didn't know DES caused heart problems: my understanding was if given in pregnancy to prevent miscarriage that it caused a rare vaginal cancer in the daughters of women who took it and also malformations of the reproductive tract. It also had effects on sons: increased risk of testicular cancer, infertility and urogenital abnormalities in development. The women themselves were at somewhat increased probability of breast cancer. Though for wild speculation, see what was said about its effects upon gender identity in the offspring.

Re: Jon Snow, M.D.

[executrix]

DES also *causes* miscarriage as well as the problems you describe in people whose mothers took DES. The reference to heart disease is about HRT.

Re: Jon Snow, M.D.

[oursin]

I misread, then.
DES was one of the earliest morning-after contraceptives, I think?
A particularly egregious fertility-related medical - well, I think it probably counts as a scam, rather than quackery, but maybe he thought it actually worked? - was the obstetrician who was taking urine samples from pregnant women (who were I presume paying him for treatment) and injecting the urine thus obtained into the women who he was 'treating' for infertility (I think this was something Jessica Mitford wrote up).

Re: Jon Snow, M.D.

[executrix]

Oh, God, that sounds horrible. I wish the processes of making sure that only intelligent and ethical people practiced medicine were more effective.

PS--love your Trotula icon!

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

Wouldn't it be nice if the FDA were allowed to regulate supplements again?

Hell, yeah.

Nine

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Your last comment about the laxatives stirs a memory of reading something years ago that talked about people's perceptions of medicine, and how in the 19th century Americans tended to assume medicines didn't work if there weren't some sort of purgative effect (placebo FTW!). Wish I could remember where I read that so I could double-check if I'm remembering that correctly. I took a class in medical anthropology in college (with an, um, interesting prof); might have been in one of the readings for that?

[resonant.livejournal.com]

eeeeep!