A better-known but less savory branch of nineteenth century medicine was the patent medicine industry, which exploded into notoriety with its extravagant use of the new late nineteenth century advertising techniques. While most patent remedies were alcohol- or narcotic-based frauds, the term patent medicine meant simply any medicine sold without a prescription and included a number of legitimate and effective over-the-counter remedies. The 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and subsequent acts of Congress were intended to control dangerous substances and put an end to spurious advertising claims, and resulted in the alteration or removal from the market of many patent medicines. Others, such as Bromo-Seltzer, survived the legislation and continued to be sold for years.
Most patent medicines were in fact not patented, for that would have meant revealing the formula to competitors and consumers alike. Nevertheless, the nature of many of the more potent over-the-counter remedies was not entirely unknown. Hostetter’s Bitters, for example, was regulated by the South Carolina Dispensary along with whiskey and beer.
Only three patent medicine bottles were recovered from the Middleton Place privy deposit, and all appear to have been rather tame digestive remedies of the sort that might be sold today. The amber bottle on the left ([Fig. 18]A) contained Maltine, probably a digestive and nutritional supplement rather than a cure. The blue bottle ([Fig. 18]B), the same shape that was later used for Bromo-Seltzer, probably contained Bromo-Caffeine, an antacid and laxative whose main ingredient was magnesia. Bromo-Caffeine was the principal product of the Keasbey & Mattison Co., which operated in Philadelphia from 1873 to 1882, and in Ambler, Pennsylvania, from 1882 to 1962. The blue-green bottle ([Fig. 18]E) contained Horsford’s Acid Phosphate of Lime, a phosphate-based preparation sold by the Rumford Chemical Works of Providence, Rhode Island, from 1868 until at least the turn of the century. On later bottles, however, the company name reads from top to bottom rather than from bottom to top.
The predecessor to these sturdy containers was a thin-walled cylindrical bottle used by the apothecaries and pharmacists of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries ([Fig. 19]). All free-blown or dip-molded, these bottles were used as late as the 1850s, and because of the Civil War, perhaps even later in some parts of the South. The two bottle bases at right are turned up to show the blow-pipe pontil scar made by holding the bottle with a blow-pipe while its neck and lip were formed. The long neck on the right is probably not from a cylindrical bottle but from a globular flask that was used in larger sizes for wine and other beverages, and in smaller sizes for medicines and essences. The style of its collar dates this bottle to after about 1820.
Figure 19. Apothecary’s vials, 18th or early 19th century. The neck and base fragments are not all from the same bottles.
WINE AND SPIRITS BOTTLES
Perhaps the oldest use for glass bottles has been the storage and transport of alcohol. Some of the oldest bottles from the Middleton Place privy are wine and spirits bottles. Bottles made in the same dark green glass as the three pictured below left were used by the earliest colonists for various wines and spirits, and, although the bottle shapes have varied over the centuries, the tradition continues in the green wine bottles of the present day.