Science has developed a lot over the past 100 years and we have come a long way from being prescribed narcotics for our teething babies or ailing parents! Antique medicines contained everything from arsenic to opium — and promised instant cures.
Pity the poor Victorian-era family whose bottle of Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup ran dry. It was touted as an indispensable aid to quiet bawling babies and teething tots, and it packed a wallop of an ingredient: morphine!
Today, no one would dream of calming an infant with morphine, but the museum of medicine is littered with such discarded remedies. Some were fanciful potions that quacks concocted to make a buck, while others were legitimate — even revered — treatments that eventually yielded to more enlightened science.
For example, opium suffers a tainted reputation these days. But doctors have favoured it throughout history, especially to control coughing and diarrhoea.
“It was regarded as an all-purpose drug. One physician called it ‘God’s own medicine,'” says James C. Whorton, PhD, a medical historian and professor at the University of Washington School of Medicine.
Doctors used arsenic and mercury to treat syphilis before the introduction of penicillin in the 1940s.
One company sold heroin tablets to relieve asthma symptoms.
Cocaine drops for toothache came on the market after doctors discovered its pain-relieving qualities. One Belgian company even promoted cocaine throat lozenges as “indispensable for singers, teachers and orators.” Dentists and surgeons also used cocaine as an anaesthetic.
Fortunately these days, we are not going to be prescribed these types of medicines for common ailments!
If you would like to make an appointment to see a professional doctor about any cough, or toothache or asthma, and be prescribed the correct medication, please call Medcare on 966 860 258