Scurvy

Poison. To be applied night and morning.

I have some wonderful pictures to share with you today thanks to collector Rex Barber from Perth, Western Australia, who owns several hundred 18th – 20th century proprietary remedy lids. Rex has exhibited his collection as far afield as the Federation of Historical Bottle Collectors’ 2012 show in Reno, NV. Many lid designs not only […]

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Mr. Lewis's Incomparable Sheep-Drench

 Although Mr Lewis admits in this ad that the causes of sheep rot were imperfectly understood, he is on the right lines when he refers to “insects in the liver.” The liver fluke, Fasciola hepatica L. was often noticed in sheep that had died of the rot, but there was a lot of controversy as to whether they were a […]

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Butler's Vegetable Restorative Tooth Powder

Image: Le Baume d’Acier by Louis Leopold Boilly. Courtesy of the US National Library of Medicine. BEAUTY, HEALTH, and a PEARLY SET of TEETH, may be preserved to old age, by the use of BUTLER’s VEGETABLE RESTORA- TIVE TOOTH-POWDER, a specific for the Tooth Ach, and its cause, the Scurvy in the Gums. Of the […]

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Walker's Jesuits Drops

Robert Walker obtained the King’s Royal Letters Patent for his remedy in 1755, and on his death, surgeon Joseph Wessels took it over. The drops were still around, under the name Wessel’s Jesuit Drops as late as the 1870s. In 1843, the Medical Times published a note stating that the Drops were “a spirituous tincture of […]

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Solomon's Drops

Happy New Year and welcome to The Quack Doctor! For more information about this new blog, please have a look at the About page. I’ll be posting transcripts of historical advertisements for all sorts of weird and wonderful patent medicines, with the aim of building up quite a collection. I’m hoping to post daily for the […]

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