“Well if the cocaine and heroin doesn’t work, let’s take a step back and give you some booze.”
~Jesus, Doc, you’re gonna make me get all weepy here. You’re the best, man.
As we’ve stated on several occasions, medicine in the late 19th century and early 20th century was basically one extended game of “I bet you I can get this guy to stick this in his mouth.” And even then, mouth if you were lucky. American doctors back then treated the flu the same way European Immigrants treat a rave- they pop in some ecstasy cut with battery acid, put in a pacifier to stop them from grinding their teeth, and rub up against velvet walls for a while. Plus, everyone in the medicine field looked like this.
Don’t let that beautiful mustache fool you, this kid was twelve years old. He’s like an olde tyme Doogie Howser. Goddamn it this era was awesome. Doctors tried to fix people the same way blind people try to fix cars- with awkward groping and a surprising amount of jammed fingers. Medicine was just as insane, since even if you excluded all the straight up hard drugs, most medicine looked like it should be drunk from a paper bag by the homeless person on your bus.
In fact, most of it looks…well, looks like something you’d take to suddenly turn into to homeless person on a bus. Either way, we’re here to salute this phenomenon by showing you even more deliciously deadly medications from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
We don’t know what any of those words mean, but we’re pretty sure it’s all Latin for “straight up poison.”
If there’s any complaint many might have with modern medicine, it’s that you really have no idea of knowing what stuff is by it’s name. Byzendrohol Pendramonate is just a bunch of fancy sounding words we typed without even googling to see if it’s a thing, but you could absolutely be told that it’s a type of medicine and you’d believe it (as it turns out, it’s just pure gibberish). These were not issues back in the day of cocaine and opium being used as medicine, as seen by our first “non-internal” medicine bottle we discovered.
Are you shitting us? If we ever bothered to learn how to make a chart, it’d probably be safe to put “poison” on the complete opposite end as “medicine.” Maybe we’re much more hardened by the harsh realities of the world, but if we ever walked into a doctor’s office and saw a jar labeled poison we’d punch them so hard in the dick that their wives would feel pangs of sympathy pain before we ran the fuck out of there. Jesus, could you imagine that being acceptable now? We live in a world where former Playboy models are responsible for the deaths of thousands of kids just because they think vaccines are poison, how would they react to doctors using actual honest to God poison? You would expect to see this bottle in a hospital only if that hospital were the set of a horror film. Speaking of medicine that gives off horror film vibes…
There’s something creepy about the “we’ll watch you as you sleep to help you get better” vibe that this product is giving off. It’s supposedly a “germicide” which sounds a lot like “poison” to us, especially when you’re supposed to burn the stuff to a vapor while you sleep to be “magically cured.” Although “Cresoline” or whatever the shit that is, it’s sort of steering away from what you came here to look for. Booze. Opium. Shit like that. Well, not booze and opium, that’s just an invitation to crush your liver into a goddamn coma, but…
Wait a minute, does that say this is 46% alcohol mixed with…Opium grains? Jesus Christ, Stickey and Poor’s, what possible use could this be? To treat asthma? What’s the logic behind that? We honestly never knew that jaundice was a way to cure asthma, but wouldn’t you say that jaundice is a bit more serious of a condition? Actually we take that back, we know we’re being a little harsh. Back then they pretty much tried to cure everything with Opium. It’s why everyone was very laid back and died in their 30s. Even Batman made opium based medicine.
Oh, wait. Bateman. Reading is hard. Though, the notion of “Pectoral Drops” also helps prove our theory that every medicine back then had absolutely retarded names.
See!? What the fuck is that? We know it’s bitters, so it’s probably for your stomach again, but why the hell is it a wigwam tonic? And more importantly, is it meant to be racist?
Oh wait. It probably is at least 50% alcohol…so yeah, totally meant to be racist. Leave it to the medicine community to make a product celebrating the fact that Indians are genetically prone to alcoholism. Real classy, 1906. But why can’t they glorify the good (read as: American) kind of alcoholism?
Okay, there is nothing on the Earth that could stop us from drinking this if we ever stumbled across it. We don’t care if it’s crazy medicine, we don’t care if the bottle we find was buried in a time capsul 150 years ago, when you make a product called “Drake’s Plantation Bitters or Old Homestead Tonic” and make it out of “Pure St. Croix Rum” we’re going to drink the shit out of that. Ain’t that right, Drake?
“No comment!”
And, to get one last look into the terrifying nature of “tonics” back in the day…
Goddamn it, if you couldn’t stop us from drinking Drake’s Bitters, you couldn’t force us to drink anything remotely similar to “Dr. G. S. Green’s Blood Purifier and Nerve Tonic.” The name alone reads like the side effects of an autoimmune disease.
Well, we’ve done all we can do to shock your senses enough to help you avoid going to the doctor for another year, so why don’t we go out on a high note? How about barbituates! For kids! Just like Marilyn Monroe used to make!
We know, we know. Everything was awesome in the past.
America Fun Fact of the Day 