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

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!