Antique and Vintage Medicine Bottles

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In medieval Europe, apothecaries and alchemists appealed to their ailing customers by displaying bottles in their windows, each filled with a different preparation of dried herbs steeped in liquid. In 18th-century England, more than 200 cure-all...
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In medieval Europe, apothecaries and alchemists appealed to their ailing customers by displaying bottles in their windows, each filled with a different preparation of dried herbs steeped in liquid. In 18th-century England, more than 200 cure-all elixirs and serums, many with their own registered brand names, were being sold. Indeed, the British market was flooded with patent and proprietary medicines, remedies with secret formulas known only to their manufacturers, who packaged their “amazing cures” in distinctive medicine bottles. Turlington’s Balsam of Life is among the earliest known of these healing elixirs. A 1747 booklet on the product claims that balsam, “gently infuses its kindly Influence into those Parts that are most in Disorder.” After 1754, Turlington’s remedy came in a trademark bottle with a short, thick neck and stepped sides that widened in the middle and narrowed at the base. It’s believed that Turlington’s made it to America during the Revolutionary War, as the British soldiers would carry it in their knapsacks. At the time, the American colonists only knew of five other British cure-alls: Bateman’s Pectoral Drops, Betton’s British Oil, Godfrey’s Cordial, Dalby’s Carminative, and Steer’s Opodeldoc. Dalby’s Carminative asserted it “allow’d to be the best thing that can be for ye Flux,” also known as dysentery. Steer’s Opodeldoc, a balm for the skin, was billed as “a speedy and certain cure” for bruises, sprains, burns, cuts, frostbite, headaches, and insect bites. In the early days of the United States, Dr. Thomas William Dyott of Philadephia grew frustrated with the poor quality of American-made medicine bottles, so he established his own glassworks, which churned out huge quantities of vessels between 1818 and 1838. By the middle of the 19th century, the country had a thriving proprietary medicine market of its own, producing bottles of all shapes—cylindrical, oval, rectangular, and paneled—often labeled with poetic claims of about...
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