asthma

Victorian asthma cigarettes: who was Dr Batty?

While browsing your local newspaper in the 1890s, an asthma-cure advertisement might distract you from tales of the latest sensational crimes. ‘Agreeable to use, certain in their effects, and harmless in their action, they may be safely smoked by ladies and children,’ ran the promotional copy. The product was Cigares de Joy, handy little cigarettes […]

Ramey’s Medicator: an inventor’s survival

Advertisements for Ramey’s Medicator claimed that it would overcome ‘death dealing disease.’ What most customers didn’t know, however, was that the inhaler would never have existed at all if its inventor had not survived a gruesome surgical ordeal. The Medicator was patented by Alfred H Ramey and Frank D Rollins on 3 June 1890. Its […]

Cigares de Joy

ADvent Calendar Day 17 . Although smoking and asthma now seem an unlikely combination, cigarettes were an efficient way of getting medication into the lungs. According to the Medical Times and Gazette in 1875, the Cigares de Joy were ‘very useful little agents for inhaling the smoke of stramonium.’ Datura stramonium and its relative Datura tatula were common remedies for asthma, formerly […]

Godfrey’s Inhaler

This mainstream medical product enabled the inhalation of vapour for the treatment of asthma, hay fever, coughs, colds and other respiratory problems. The vapour was created by combining hydrochloric acid and ammonium chloride, which were provided in attractive little glass bottles – one clear and one emerald green. There are some pictures of the product, […]

Crossthwaite & Co’s Occult Lozenges

While I’m researching my posts, I find a lot of interesting ads that I put to one side to blog about one day. But sometimes it turns out that I can’t discover much about them, or they’re so famous that there’s not a lot I can add to the info already available online, or they’re […]

Jackson's Asthmatic Candy

In Autumn 1800, the proprietors of this remedy, J. Barclay & Son, who had taken over the patent in the 1780s, found it necessary to change the name to Barclay’s Asthmatic Candy. According to them, the death of Mr Jackson had “afforded an opportunity for unprincipled persons to assume his name, to put off their pernicious compositions.” […]