Old cough mixture recipe

[ThePolishWombat]

I’ve just seen a picture of a Victorian cough mixture bottle.
It contained alcohol, chloroform, cannabis oil and a couple of other interesting ingredients
It’s got me intrigued: what other genuine medical treatments/procedures/advice from days passed have you heard about that have made you think “Surely not?!”
Like the old adverts for Camel cigarettes: “The cigarettes your doctor recommends” or something along those lines wasn’t it?

Some of the more modern cough medicines are even worse

To be honest, I don’t think I’ve had any kind of over-the-counter cough medicine since I was a kid!!
But I do remember as a teenager, people drinking it by the bottle to get high

haha yeah same here. Its full of codeine. Some of them even morphine. Its the only thing that really works though. I did it myself at school until I stated weeing orange..

The cough mixture people bought to get high was called Collis Brown. I never tried it but, until recently, you could get Ipecac and morphine from the pharmacist - the only cough mixture that really worked.

Queen Victoria had marijuana cigarettes for menstrual cramps. There used to be a packet of them in the museum in Chichester.

Until quite recently Gripe Water contained alcohol, at about the same strength as a light beer.

You should watch Casualty 1909, it was a bbc drama written using hospital records from The London Hospital. Strychnine was one of the treatments, for scarlet fever I believe.

AdaColeman I knew about the old gripe water - my Nana swore by it. Was literally her solution every time I mentioned one of my babies crying
So in all likelihood my mum and my aunts and uncles spent half their infancy pissed