Y'all, today was a LOT. And this is going to be packed with info and photos, mostly mine, but I am having such a gleeful time looking up the things we saw today, and I just HAVE to put it in here.
We woke up this morning fully expecting the tropical storm style rain to have hit full force while we slept, so we didn't bother to set an alarm. We leisurely tooled around the hotel room until about 9, and decided it was a good morning for Cafe Envie. The last time we went to New Orleans, we discovered this place far tooo late in our stay to revisit it as much as we felt it deserved. They had, hands down, the best croissant we had ever had, and we have been chasing the taste and texture of those croissants since we left.
Two hams, coming right up!
The croissant. THE croissant. Although, according to Derek, "it was buttery and delicious, but not as flaky as the first time. It was just as tasty."
This was my meal. A prosciutto, asparagus, and provolone omelet that tasted more like salt than anything else. Yikes. And a bummer. I left hungry, as I have pretty much every day that we've been here. I am Jack's Sad Tummy.
After Cafe Envie, we drove to St. Roch's Cemetery #1, where the internet assured me that, despite renovations for termites or some such shit, I could still see the shrine I had been waiting to see for years and years. Spoiler alert, and bad news from the past: I could not.
Well.
I COULD, just not in any kind of meaningful capacity. I took what I could get, though.
I think I've made it fairly clear in my blog that, while I gleefully disbelieve in all gods, I am quite fond of the pageantry of religion. I love the stupid holiday traditions (some more than others), I love the stupid beliefs because they are just so fucking absurd, and the story of St. Roch is one of the more absurd, and I am kind of obsessed with it. So I'll sum up, in the interest of brevity.
Back in the way back times, circa the 1300s, this bro Roch was like, chilling out in Italy when the plague hit, and he was like, FUCK IT'S THE FUCKING PLAGUE, I better fucking like..do some shit about it. So he figured helping the plague ridden was a better idea than fucking right the fuck outta there. By helping, I mean he read them the bible and talked about god and shit, seeing as how those pestilence ridden fuckers were about to meet him and all. Gotta cram for finals in that situation. Anyway, Roch got the plague, because obviously, and for all of his troubles, he was banished from his little town. So he was like, Well, I mean, I guess I'd better goo die in this forest LOL. He hermited himself away, as is the custom when you're a banished plague victim. Some dog wandered up to him and was like, bruh, you look fucked up, you need bread? And Roch was like, UMYAH. So this dog brought Roch bread and Roch was like, cool, wanna lick my festering fucking plague sores? And the dog was like, FUCK YEAH. And then Roch was healed. Some fucko from the town Roch was banished from found these two in the woods, just hanging out being cool and shit, and the guy was like, WOAH, HOLY SHIT, YOU'RE HEALED, I GOTTA BE YOUR DISCIPLE!
Which.
Let's take a beat here and acknowledge that, as the legend goes, Roch wasn't healed until AFTER the dog licked his wounds. So really, uh...the DOG should be the saint here. The guy should have become a disciple of THE DOG.
Back to business.
So after all of this shit, Roch is like...knighted or promoted to Saint or whatever the fuck it is that happens, I don't know all of the paperwork and formalities. Saint Roch is the patron saint of...several incongruous things, and as a whole, they are hilarious. Saint Roch is the patron saint of dogs, invalids, the falsely accused, bachelors, Istanbul, surgeons, tile makers, gravediggers, pilgrims, apothecaries, and second hand merchants. What...what the fuck? Come the fuck on. Pick a theme and stick with it, my guy. Find your lane.
Zooming forward to the closer, but still super far in the past, way back times, yellow fever was doing a fucking number on Louisiana. For real, in 50 years 40 thousand people succumbed to it (succumbed is fancy for "died as fuck"), and that number only represents the deaths from that time in New Orleans. Shit was wild as fuck. So, in the 1860s, this reverend was all like, SHIT. I have to do something, this yellow fever is taking out all of my parishioners. And his genius idea was to pray to St. Roch, begging with all of his dumb little body that his invisible friend would keep his community safe from the scourge (just his community. Selfish. Couldn't ask for a favor for like...everybody else? OR do prayers have a range of efficacy?).
And it worked.
For whatever reason, that parish suffered no losses to the yellow fever epidemic.
So the reverend who did all of that praying was like, cool, thanks bruh, let me build you this fucking chapel and shit to show my gratitude. So he built a tiny little chapel in the middle of town and was like, alright! Job done.
But the locals were like, super greedy for more than just that "not dying of yellow fever" bullshit, they wanted more. Because that's how people are. So people came from all around to pray at this little chapel for a speedy recovery from whatever thing ailed them, and when they got better, they would come back to the shrine and be like, thanks, bro, here is my glass eye, I don't need it anymore, thought you might want it. So for decades, the healed believers have left their fake feet, their crutches, their false teeth, whatever it was that they believe St. Roch relieved them of suffering from, as thanks. So there is an amazing shrine of the things people have left over the years.
This is not the only space where the items are stored, but it is the only one I could get a shot of through the dirty window AND the dirty plastic covering the dirty window. It isn't the gawking I had planned on doing, but it'll have to suffice.
We walked around the cemetery playing the standard "find the oldest death date" (I think I won at 1893), and right before leaving, I came across this interesting grave:
Listen here.
I have questions. Several questions. Chief among them, however, is....are we meant to be watering our corpses? With the same delivery system that we water our gerbils and hamsters? WHAT IS HAPPENING HERE.
After St. Roch Cemetery, we drove out to an abandoned location I have been wanting to explore for a few months (I found it when we booked our trip, since we hadn't had time to explore anything abandoned the last time we were in NOLA). I found a spot that allowed us to climb a tree, and climb a fence, to get onto the property, and it should be noted that by this time, it had been steadily drizzling for several hours. So it was muddy, muggy, and generally grody out.
I did not get anything even good adjacent while we were there, I got a really not great vibe from this place.
The view from the fence we climbed to get onto the property.
The primary view of the front of the building, but you know...from the side.
More side view. That hot hot side action.
This is the courtyard, and I had to do some seriously heavy lifting in lightroom to make it something you can even see, let alone discern what kinds of things you're seeing. And that grain. Ugh. Here are the photos I took on my cell phone, which are marginally less terrible. Or more terrible. You be the judge!
Derek and I have made tentative plans to return with our tripods and flashes, because the chapel looked amazing (after Derek did some heavy lifting of his own with his photos), and we're hoping that returning on a day with less rain will provide a better chance for photos. We'll see how the trip plays out.
Derek found a hole in the fence, so we were able to just...walk right out instead of climbing trees and fences. We saw what I think was a Mississippi kite, just hanging out on a power line, but I haven't done enough checking to say that with any kind of authority. It's just a hunch.
We left and drove to another location I wanted to investigate, but I found that I was far too late for this building. Not only had it been demolished, but it had been demolished long enough ago that grass had grown over where the building once sat. I threw an internal temper tantrum over it, and sulked for a solid five minutes. During that five minutes of sulking, as we drove back to the tourist section of New Orleans, the rain REALLY started coming down. Sheets and sheets of it. It made driving problematic. Whoops, I wrote that wrong. It made PASSENGER SEAT DRIVING problematic, as I couldn't see the road.
No worries, though. We dropped the car off at the hotel, grabbed our umbrellas and our camera gear, and headed off to the Museum of Death. Which was uncomfortably packed (I am fully vaccinated, I wear my mask everywhere, and I am STILL paranoid about large groups of people), and also fucking lame as fuck. It was pretty much one mummified cat and a fuckton of pictures of murder victims. We weren't allowed to take pictures inside, so we didn't, and I will hold fast in the reasoning I told Derek, Laurel, and Alex, afterward: they don't allow pictures because they don't want you showing everybody else how utterly crap the museum is. Museum. That's seriously giving itself airs. It needs to come at itself modestly. It's more like the Room of Crap. It was an absolute let down.
But that's ok, because the real star of the day was The Pharmacy Museum. Now, I went here last time, but Derek didn't. So I didn't get to explore it as much as I wanted to. But this time, Derek was interested, and Laurel was interested, so I really got to investigate, and I am so fucking glad, because this very well may be my favorite place in New Orleans.
Here's where the blog is going to get long, because not only am I going to share the photos I took, I'm going to talk about all of these AMAZING fucking tinctures number two, and number one, give you fucks a history lesson, because this fucking place has EVERYTHING.
Right off the bat, this was the very first apothecary in the united states. The guy who opened it was also the first licensed pharmacist in the united states. That's cool, right? Yeah, it totally is. Buckle up, it gets worse.
So this first licensed pharmacist opens up the very first apothecary, and is like, this shit needs to be multifunctional. So the apothecary is also a post office, a hardware store, and a soda fountain (the soda fountain is still in the museum, which I find absolutely delightful!), so locals were always like, just hanging out at the pill joint, getting their soda on and mailing letters and shit. A solid time circa the 1820s. The founder was a pretty successful pharmacist, as they go. All of the herbs, and fuckin' cobblestone dust and like, dried tar or whatever that he put into his tinctures were pretty helpful to the people who were buying them alongside their warm, flat by today's standards sodas, and all jokes aside, he was very instrumental in getting quinine to the people beset by yellow fever in the area. He was fucking legit. As legit as a doctor back then could be.
Thirty years after he opened the pharmacy, he sold it to a serious fucking douche canoe for the respectable sum of $18,000 which, according to the most basic of google searches, is worth over half a million in today's money. 557k, approximately. The founder took that money and fucked right off to France, dying shortly after of what I can only imagine was drowning in his own fucking wealth.
This next dude that bought the local soda-ing hole was not so great. Nobody wanted to hang out to have a soda after buying a hammer and some Mexican Bowel Pills (those are totally a real thing, I am so excited to put these pictures up!), because the rumor mill was percolating the hottest of teas: this mother fucker was unethical, and experimental, but not in a fun, sexy kind of way. He was mixing things together that had no right to be mixed into themselves and selling it to unsuspecting people who only needed to mail their letters. His experimental tonics didn't even work, so he was fleecing his customers, to boot. The gossip squad was ALSO talking about how people were pretty regularly going into the place...and never coming out. And when people asked the new owner about it, he was just like, "fuck if I know, I bet they went back to France."
Among the list of nasty allegations against this non-licensed charlatan, perhaps the worst was his experimentation on pregnant enslaved women, doing the utter most to dehumanize them and devalue more than society already did. He just like, threw shit into bottles, shook it up, and was like LOL drink up, let's fucking see what happens, maybe you'll explode LOL. There were also whispers that he was putting addictive compounds in his tonics, like cocaine and heroine, to make it so his clientele stayed hooked on his nonsense formulas.
This bro practiced his bullshit for ten years before he, in a fit of delicious irony, died of syphilis. After he died, the bodies of his many, many victims were found buried in the courtyard. The very courtyard where the herbs for all of his fuckery had been grown. The pharmacy museum is said to be wildly haunted, by none other than the syphilitic second owner himself, and perhaps the ghosts of his victims.
NOW. To clear the air here, I am unsure how much of that is just fun, ghastly lore to tell on a haunted tour of New Orleans, because it makes for great, shivery fodder. Madcap wanna be doctor, murdering women and unborn babies, murdering patients, just generally being a fuckball? And now he's haunting the place he did all of these shitty things in? AND his victims are locked in that same space with him for all eternity? Sold!!!
However, after about an hour of investigating, I can only find evidence of the second owner's property being given to his widow upon his death. If that little tidbit of information hit the papers at the time, surely scores of bodies being found on said property would have made a page, as well? I could find no verification of his atrocious treatment of people in New Orleans, though that doesn't mean it didn't happen, it just means that an hour of digging is my threshold, and if the information is out there, I'm leaving it to more steadfastly inquisitive minds. It certainly makes for a good tale, though. There should also be something noted that...I had a little itch in the back of my mind while reading up on all of these accounts of the horrendous pharmacist and his house of horrors, emphasis on addictive additives like cocaine in his tonics. I did a little searchy-search on the ol' google machine, and it turns out, the nag in my brain was right...soda fountains were used by pharmacists to aid their patients in washing down their nasty ass medicines. A pretty common ingredient in sodas of that era? Cocaine. I think it's pretty common knowledge that Coca Cola is so named BECAUSE of a primary ingredient of the drink being fucking cocaine. As for the heroin, well...I mean...most importantly, heroin as it is understood today, and contextualized in the lore about this museum's second owner that I read across the great chasm of the internets...wasn't invented until 1874. The bad doctor died in 1867, which you'll notice is before the synthesis of heroin as we know it. So that marks that rumor as untrue, and even if it had been....it may come as a shock to you that pharmacists back in the day were fucking WILD when it came to just dosing people on shit we qualify as schedule 1 these days. Fucking morphine was like, given to babies and shit. Just put morphine on their gums when they're teething, it's precisely what they need!
I'm no historian, but I truly am hard pressed to find any documentation, other than lots and lots of haunted new orleans websites, and pages like Atlas Obscura, that legitimizes any of the legend I recounted. That doesn't mean the telling isn't fun, and by all means, feel free to leave out the boring truth of the matter if you want to pass along a solid tale of madness and medical mayhem. I'm all for it.
There is more air to clear, as well. History at the museum talks about it being the first apothecary in America...it wasn't. There is a pretty solid history of Apothecaries in the colonized areas on the east coast (Boston, in particular) as early as the 1710s and 20s. So what the museum means is, the apothecary was the first LICENSED apothecary in the united states. The man who founded it truly was the first licensed pharmacist, that bit is not a manipulation of the truth.
Here comes the fun stuff, though!!! The tinctures and goodies that are housed in the museum! Honestly, I could have spent all fucking day investigating this place and taking photos of everything they had housed there. Per their website, these display bottles come from all over the world, but are pretty era specific to the time it was open (the 1820s through the...whenever it closed? I know the museum opened in 1950, so it closed as an apothecary sometime before then). And the labels are absolutely WILD. I was having the best time editing these photos and then looking up the medicines I got the best photos of. I want to apologize for this blog being so long, but I won't, because I'm not actually sorry. This is funny and interesting
So here we go.
First up:
Dr. Edison's Obesity Salt! I was unsure of whether or not this salt caused obesity (times were rough back then, and rations may have been scant. Gotta put meat on those bones to survive the plagues running rampant in the cities!), or "cured" it. If you are like me, you will find this ad circa the 1890s incredibly helpful.
Though that creates more problems than it solves. Which one is the obesity fruit? I found another ad, identical layout and photos, just different copy, headlined with OBESITY? DON'T REMAIN STOUT! My favorite part is that it tastes like soda, and helps you remain thin. I BET IT'S ALL THE FUCKING COCAINE IN THE SODA "TASTE".
Next in line:
Honestly, I just laughed at the name. Himrod's gave me great joy. Is that him(rod) on the tin? So stoic. From my meager hunting, I am going to guess that is, in fact, Himrod hisownself on the tin, as the powder was created by a man named Peter Himrod. Peter Himrod founded Himrod Manufacturing Company, and I am unclear on what gave Peter Himrod any kind of medical authority to make an asthma cure other than men just have a fuck ton of unearned confidence to do whatever the fuck they want. It's been a struggle to find info on Peter Himrod, and his company, other than it was founded in New Jersey in the 1920s. Other than that, it's a mystery lost to the annals of time.
How does one take Himrod's Asthma Powder, you may be musing? I thought you'd never ask!
Hm. Sounds like perfectly real and not at all made up medicine to me, I'm sure that's a very popular delivery method.
Now let's look at these ads.
No opiates?? Fuck that, then, I don't want it.
So, at first I thought it was fucking hysterical that this ad has a bunch of dead mother fuckers testifying to it. Couldn't find any alive persons of distinction, could we? And then I did some digging and...I feel like this MUST be a joke someone made, because...seriously...three of those people died of fucking bronchial complications, one I couldn't find a cause of death, and the other died suddenly (and I'm just spitballing here, but of some sort of...breathing related illness, perhaps?). The date on the website I found the latter ad on says it's from a London paper circa 1887. Which sits a little poorly, as I had previously found a date for Himrod's being founded in 1924.
I'm not entirely sure that ad IS a joke, though, as I found ANOTHER Himrod's ad, also touting the praise of a fucking Earl that died of fucking bronchitis:
If this is also a legit ad, the information I found saying Himrod's was founded in 1924 must be incorrect, as Disraeli died in 1881, and thirty years from that is 1911 (that's how many years they've been milking the ill begotten praise for their hack ass cure from a dead PM), and another 10 years for the 40 years it's been on the market to customers means it was in production before Disraeli died, so sometime in the late late late 1870s, early as balls 1880s. I think. It's 1am, and my investigative skills and math abilities are waning fast.
In fact, I am going to take a break from this to go to sleep. This blog post has already taken hours and hours t write, and I have a fancy early breakfast with my hot as fuck man piece and my charming, wonderful step daughter. Which I will write about tomorrow night, and hopefully still have time to finish this post, as it will take several more hours.
After a lovely breakfast at Brennan's, I'm back to finish up what is surely going to be my longest post to date.
Where were we? Yes! Snake oils!!
Up next we have:
This is Minard's Liniment. Minard was known as...or dubbed himself..."The King Of Pain" (sorry, Sting). That's a bold, rather confusing, claim to make when you're a merchant for a pain reliever? Are you...the king of causing pain? Do you rule over everyone IN pain? The moniker says absolutely nothing about relieving pain. Which is what liniment was meant to do. It was literally a catch all for anybody alive. Have an ailment? Minard's has you covered. Check out these ads:
Do you...do you have the same questions I have? So, this is the front and back of an advert card for Minard's Liniment. The back, which is the bit demanding you ask your druggist for Minard's Liniment (which I shan't be doing, thank you), totally tracks. That is a great advert, it states plainly what it cures, how much it is, why you need it, where you can get it. Solid work. The front, though. The front needs work. So a man is seeking refuge...to Canada (I believe that's where Minard's originated, and bonus fun fact, still operates out of today!)...which is fine. But....he's got a sack of money on his back, and it's no small sum. 10,000 smackers. Plus, he has an absolutely cartoonish mustache that just screams villain, and that walk he's in the middle of? That money is clearly stolen. And about that mustache...
Here is another card I found advertising Minard's Liniment:
I'm pretty fucking sure that mustachioed thief crime walking jauntily to Canada with a stick and bindle full of money is Minard himself.
I found a picture of a bottle that you can read. Liniment sounds like Vick's Vaporub that you can eat.
And good news, all you animal lovers! If you have no need of this miracle drug, you can cure your livestock of anything from colic to cracked teats! If you can't guzzle it away or rub it away with liniment, is it even really a problem? Hooray! Life is solved!!
I offer you now:
That's a yikes from me. But this is just another liniment, only you can't eat it. I don't know what makes it Japanese Style, but you can tell from the authentic font that it's definitely from the mysterious orient, and therefore it works.
I found a bunch of bottles of this stuff, but nothing with any ingredients, or any explanation of what made this oil "Japanese Style", other than the obvious answer of racism and mysticism sold shit like hot cakes, and it's nothing more than marketing. When I first looked this stuff up, I found another company by the same name, ENARCO, that sold motor oil. And I thought to myself, well. That's what the secret is, it's just fucking motor oil in a prettier package, because everybody back then was a stone cold idiot. That isn't the case. The liniment seller, ENARCO, is a medicinal company that only sells medicine, no side hustles with motor oil (this does not absolve them of the very real possibility that they put motor oil in prettier bottles and sold it to bumpkins up and down America), and their name is a play on the initials of their company, NRCo. It stands for National Remedy Company. I love it, I'm here for a good portmanteau adjacent name.
I was fortunate to find the research a gentleman did about the liniment his wife's family made, and one of the key ingredients in their liniment was ENARCOs Japanese Style oil. He did the leg work for me (though he didn't site sources, so I'll just have to trust him here), and it seems that ENARCO's Japanese Style Oil's main ingredient is...fusel oil. Fusel oil, capsicum, turpentine (??!?!?!??), camphor, and then some essential oils, for good measure. If you are uninitiated to fusel oil, welcome to the club I left only five minutes ago! Allow me to enlighten you:
Fusel oil is essentially the shitty, bad news run off from alcohol fermentation.
Delicious! AND healthy!
Here are the directions for applying ENARCO to rid you of whatever ails you:
No animal oil or fat, huh? Thank goodness. I don't want anything gross in my turpentine liniment!
Got a kid? Just toss this shit in some lard. Perfection.
I scoured the internet (for ten minutes) to see if fusel use was the hot ticket in Japan for any era, and I couldn't find a single thing about it, though I did find lots of studies done by Japanese doctoral candidates about the use of fusel oil in various arenas, but that clearly doesn't count. I am left to shout YIKES over the use of Japanese in the marketing. Yikes.
Hang on properly to your titties, because it's time to treat them right:
I laughed solidly at this when I saw it in the museum, and Derek and I speculated wildly about what on earth this shit did. Did it make your boobs bigger? Did it make them smaller, like obesity salt? Did it grow you more, so you just had titties all about your person, as god surely intended? All of these claims seemed equally as plausible as the next, given the hokum these peddlers advertised. Imagine my sadness to research that, again, it's just Vick's you can fucking eat. Or drink, in this case.
As per the instructions, anybody suffering from any kind of chest cold, or chest area issue, steeps a heaping spoonful of this shit for several hours (SEVERAL???), and then drinks two cups of it. One in the morning, one at night. If that doesn't cure you, then you drink a cup every two hours, and I guess you just spend your entire convalescence steeping fucking titty tea until you're better. If your kids are sick, they can drink your titty tea, too! Just give them proportionally less, which is verbatim what it says as a direction. I don't know what proportionally less means. Proportional to what? Sadly, St. Jacobs Oil Company, who established the patent for this tea in 1894, are no longer around to ask follow up questions.
I sense some of the people without breasts feel left out. Well, don't worry, Hamburg Brand has you covered!
Ah yes, the two genders: breast tea, and blood drops.
Speaking of the breast tea gender, we're getting into specific medicines for specific bodies, and there is no way to not yikes the entire way through this particular tonic:
Let's play a game. How many YIKES will there be when I name and describe this medicine? Take your guess and place your bets, since I already know the answer. Drumroll please....
Dr. Simmons (we're alright so far) Squaw (YIKES!) Vine Compound: Recommended for the relief of diseases peculiar (yikes) to women, and derangements arising from disorders of the female organs (yikes, yikes, YIKES). Also for general debility and as a nerve tonic.
Whatever you guessed, you were wrong. The answer is all of the yikes. For the drawing, for the wording, for the earnest sexism and commodification of indigenous peoples and animism, just pile all the yikes on there and burn that fucker to death. Though I will be ok if you want to deduct one yikes for the fact that it's Strictly Vegetables.
Though, when they say strictly vegetables, I have my doubts. If you're curious as to why, I am floored to report that this shit is fucking TWELVE PERCENT ALCOHOL. And the directions for ingestion are pretty liberal as they come.
"As a tonic, take a dessert spoonful three times a day. For pains and weaknesses caused by delayed menstruation or irregularities, take a tablespoonful three times a day, before and during the menstrual period until relieved."
"As a tonic" is medicine for "take it just because".
Just blitz yourself stupid on casually racist sexism juice until you're done bleeding, and you'll be just fucking fine.
I really love when cis men display how very fucking little they understand about cis women/trans men's bodies. The side of the box is perhaps my favorite yikes of all:
In case you can't read the side of the box, here is a transcription:
FOR GIRLS. Approaching Womanhood. Who suffer from headaches, nervousness, bad breath, poor appetite, painful irregularities peculiar to their age should use DR. SIMMONS SQUAW (yikes!!!) VINE COMPOUND. It is well adapted to such conditions and to assist nature to establish health and regularity.
I guess...any time I'm late, I should just have a few spoonfuls of the strongest beer or wine I can find a few times a day until my period arrives? Well, if the doctor says so!
The other side of the box advertises to WOMEN:
Suffering from weakness, nervousness, debility, headaches, nausea of the stomach (as opposed to...nausea of the arm?), and the distress which accompanies changing conditions of life.
Are you menopausal? Get drunk, you shriveling bitch!
I thought the sides of the box were my favorite, until I saw the back. And I'm not going to type it all up, because it is a LOT.
I tried to find ingredients, but the only place that had an available insert from the box to view wanted me to pay to view it, and I'm just not about that life. Not because I'm cheap, but because I'm broke. I could see just enough to make out the words PINE TAR AND HONEY, and I suppose I'll go ahead and throw an ick on top of my yikes pile and let it all burn to nothing.
What have we got next?
This one is a photo I only took on my phone for reasons I do not recall, but it's too wonderful to not include it. May I present to you:
Some brand's Chocolated Worm Syrup!! Now, I couldn't find anything on this one, because the brand was gone, but it turns out that everybody was selling worm syrups back in the day. Check out this ad from another brand:
DEATH TO WORMS! DEATH TO WORMS! Be a good parent, and bring death to worms!!
Oh no, this is our last one! But it's a good one, and I definitely laughed with Derek and Laurel about this one this morning.
For our last pharmaceutical offering, I offer you up the tincture-y goodness of...
BOVININE!! A thing people willingly ingested!!
What does the ol' internet googler mah-cheen have for us on this miracle tonic? I'm so glad you asked.
First, and obviously most importantly, is the active ingredient: defibrinated beef blood.
I am pleased to give you this
informative primer on how exactly one defibrinates beef blood. Or any blood, really. If you don't feel like clicking that and reading about how to make blood stay smooth so you can drink it in your milk or grape juice, allow me to sum up: you just whip the blood up with special beaters, and boom. No more fibrin. Now it's the perfect texture for drinking!
What does Bovinine do? Well, mainly, it grosses me out. But for those who believed it to be curative, here is what the bottle says:
Essentially, Bovinine is used to beef up (pun not intended) people who are malnourished. Per the bottle itself:
"Bovinine is prescribed to supplement the diet in convalescence, undernourishment, and in other conditions where a product such as Bovinine - possessing the nutritive properties of the blood of beeves - is recommended."
So there you have it. The beeves are drained dry so the sickly can drink them up and feel full of pep, vim, and vigor again. And I wasn't joking earlier...the recommended method of consumption is in a glass of milk, or grape juice. Two completely incongruous things, though really, I do not want to know what two drinks would best go with drinking the blood of beeves.
I didn't do much digging into this, only about five minutes, but it should surprise nobody when I report that my five minutes of googling (which...actually is a lot of googling) found nothing on this being a helpful thing to do if you're wasted away and practically starving. None of these products did anything other than take people's money (and maybe, in the case of those born with a uterus, get them drunk as fuck), and it's possible they made them even more ill.
I actually had one more bottle. My very favorite one, and I saved it for last, but sadly, I couldn't find any archived info on it. No ads, no bottles for sale, not write ups, no nothing. Well, not nothing, but let me show you the photo.
I just fucking LOVE that this tonic says it can cure lost manhood AND poverty blood. I looked up poverty blood, because it was so horrendous/hilarious to me, and it turns out, poverty of the blood was a very real way that anemia was discussed. It was also called the green sickness, as people struck with it might get a little tint of green to their skin.
Anyway, no fun ads or info on this tonic, but I DID find five court cases where the company was sued and their various tinctures were seized because they were full of shit. Four of the medicines were for people, and the fifth medicine was for chickens. They couldn't even get chicken medicine right. And chickens can't even complain! Tremendous. I read the court rulings, and I will link them here for you:
Each of those hyperlinks has info on other court cases against Gibson, Howell & Co. Go nuts.
Here are the other photos I liked from the pharmacy museum, though they're not interesting or entertaining.
After leaving the museum, we went to our favorite place for po' boys:
Went across the street too Bourbon Pride, and then the skies opened up and we trudged the mile home in an absolute downpour, and called it a night.
All in all, a wonderful day.
