Dear Dona: Old time medicine

Since it's still holiday time I have plenty of free hours during the day to do what suits me.

It varies everyday but today was dedicated to mindless TV.

I don't usually spend time watching TV and never find anything too interesting save a few cooking programs and some fascinating documentaries on the Discovery channels so mostly I sit in the living room having the TV as a background noise...

In the afternoon, while I was searching for something that would induce a well deserved nap, I stumbled on a programme that instead tickled my curiosity.

It was a program on old-time medicine and how practitioners (mostly who didn't really have a clue!) travelled from town to town putting up quite a show in front of crowds...

I'm not sure about the healing properties of the concoctions they used to sell but certainly the entertainment value was outstanding.

Old time medicines contained everything from arsenic to opium and promised instant cures.

Winslow's Soothing Syrup was one of them, seen as indispensable to quiet babies and teething toddlers, it was based on a fantastic ingredient: Morphine!

Thank goodness today nobody would ever dream of calming down a baby by giving morphine (not that they'd confess to it at least!) but there are several other substances that were used at the beginning that we definitely wouldn't use in conventional medicines nowadays.

Opium was commonly used to control coughing

Arsenic and Mercury cured syphilis

Cocaine cured toothache

Heroin was given to help with asthma

Now, I am asthmatic, imagine me turning to my dad and trying to explain that the heroin I'd keep in my drawer only had curative purposes!!!

Some medicines simply took an all-round approach. In 1862, Mixer's Cancer and Scrofula Syrup claimed to treat "Cancer, Tumors, Erysipelas, Abscesses, Ulcers, Fever Sores, Goiter, Catarrh, Salt Rheum, Scald Head, Piles, Rheumatism, and ALL BLOOD DISEASES."

Goodness me, give me the formula for that and who needs med school for the next 6 years?!?

No doubt there will be more medical advances on the horizon that will make some of today's medicines outdated. So perhaps it's wise to avoid smugness.

All I know is that I found a few pictures that I want to share that really had me torn between horror and seriously thinking "Come on... you know it works!" :-)