A more recent import from Britain, penicillin, may prove to have an even longer life on these shores than did Turlington's Balsam or Bateman's Drops. Still, two hundred years is a long time. Despite the fact that these early English patent medicines are nearly forgotten by the public today, their American career is none the less worth tracing. It reflects aspects not only of medical and pharmaceutical history, but of colonial dependence, cultural nationalism, industrial development, and popular psychology. It reveals how desperate man has been when faced with the terrors of disease, how he has purchased the packaged promises offered by the sincere but deluded as well as by the charlatan. It shows how science and law have combined to offer man some safeguards against deception in his pursuit of health.
The time seems ripe to write the epitaph of the old English patent medicines in America. That they are now a chapter of history is a token of medical progress for mankind.
Figure 16.—Turlington's Balsam of Life Bottle (all four sides) found in an Indian grave at Mobridge, South Dakota; now preserved in the U.S. National Museum. (Cat. No. 32462, Archeol.; Smithsonian photo 42936-A.)
Footnotes
[ 1 ] Unless otherwise indicated, the early English history of these patent medicines has been obtained from the following sources: "Proprietaries of other days," Chemist and Druggist, June 25, 1927, vol. 106, pp. 831-840; C. J. S. Thompson, The mystery and art of the apothecary, London, 1929; C. J. S. Thompson, Quacks of old London, London, 1928; and A. C. Wootton, Chronicles of pharmacy, London, 1910, 2 vols.
[ 2 ] "How the patent medicine industry came into its own," American Druggist, October 1933, vol. 88, pp. 84-87, 232, 234, 236, 238.