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?