Alcohol-Based Medicines

This recipe for a mid-1800s, homemade medicine was posted in a recipe-sharing group on Facebook:

COUGH SYRUP
1 cup honey
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 cup vinegar
1/4 tsp. alum
1/4 to 1/2 cup whiskey
Combine honey, cinnamon, vinegar, and alum and bring to a boil. Stir, remove from heat, and allow to cool. Stir in whiskey, and pour into clean bottle. Shake well before using. [The recipe does not give a recommended dose.]

37-1/2% alcohol content in a 1920s patent medicine

The alcohol content in that homemade cough syrup reminded me of a diagram (see above)  in one of my old textbooks. (Healthy Living Book Two: Principles of Personal and Community Hygiene, by Dr. Charles-Edward Amory Winslow. Published in New York by the Charles E. Merrill Company in 1924.)

In more recent times (1940s-1950s), the patent medicine Hadacol was popular throughout the Southern U.S. and beyond. Hadacol was the concoction of Louisiana State Senator Dudley LeBlanc. It was especially popular in many "dry" counties of the South because of its alcohol content. Besides the alcohol, it contained a fairly long list of vitamins and minerals, and it had a strong, medicinal taste. It's widely reported that some drugstores sold it by the shotglass.

Flikr photo by Logan Molen. Creative Commons
license: Some Rights Reserved.

Related:
Dudley LaBlanc and The Hadacol Boogie
La Valse de Hedacol
The Hadacol Bounce

Cypress Trees at Reelfoot Lake

On a blistering, steamy day in early July, I spent a few hours at beautiful Reelfoot Lake State Park in northwest Tennessee.

I've always been curious about Reelfoot Lake. It was created by the massive earthquakes on the New Madrid Fault in 1811-1812 that made the Mississippi River run backward for a short while. That's very interesting, but the bald cypresses that grow there are the real reason I wanted to see it. The lake covers what used to be a cypress forest. The trees still thrive at water's edge.

Reelfoot Lake is a wintering place for many waterfowl, and it's also a great place to fish for crappie, bluegill, bass, and catfish,according to locals. Much of the lake has a floor of cypress stumps that provides habitat for a large variety of aquatic species.

"The largest Buffalo ever caught in Reelfoot Lake.
Caught 10-20-23. Weight 66 lbs."

The visitors center and park headquarters are on the west side of the lake, near Tiptonville. They have exhibits and a wonderful boardwalk about half-a-mile long that lets you experience first-hand the cypress swamp at the edge of the lake. I saw more cypress knees in the hour that I spent on the boardwalk than I've seen in the entire rest of my life.

Mosquito repellant is a good idea.

The boardwalk and the lake beyond

Bald cypress trunk and knees

Cypress trees and the boardwalk

Photomyne as a Downsizing Tool

I'm in my mid-60s, and after a lifetime of collecting books, my house is full of them. So I'm trying to reduce the size of my library. It's part of a desire (and a need) to downsize my entire collection of worldly possessions.

I've been looking through the old school textbooks that I've gathered over the years. I like them because of the insight they give about life in former times and I've collected them for that reason.

To help me let some of the old school books go, I installed an app called Photomyne on my smart phone. With the app, the camera on your phone acts as a scanner, so you can capture any printed image. The basic version is free, and the pro version costs 99¢ per month. I went pro because it allows you to store your images online (if you want) instead of filling up your phone with them. The scanned images upload automatically to the Photomyne website, and then I can download them to my desktop computer.

The Photomyne people mostly talk about using their app to scan loose snapshots or in pages in photo albums. But I have been using it to scan some pages.from my old school books. It works fairly well. I'm pleased enough with it that I've now scanned parts of four textbooks. After capturing what I want to save from them, I am now OK now giving three of those books away. I'm going to keep the fourth one.

If I keep working at the rate of one book every day or two, and my discard ratio holds true, I should see a bit of empty bookshelf space soon. That would be a good thing.

Here are a few images from one of the books I am letting go (Healthy Living Book 2, by Charles-Edward Amory Winslow, Dr. P.H. Published in 1924 by Charles E. Merrill Company.) These scans are exactly as the Photomyne app produced them.

Switchboard operator

Some of the images have some arcing of the straight lines.  That's because the pages of the book were not lying perfectly flat. I believe it would be a problem when scanning from a book in an ordinary flat-bed scanner too. I could try to fix the distortion with imaging software, if it really bothered me. (I use Paintshop Pro, but Photoshop, Gimp, and many other programs would do the job, too.)

Bacteriology lab equipment of 1920s

All of these images were small pictures on the pages of a small book, but the app did a good job of enlarging them, in my opinion.

Alcohol content of a popular patent
medicine compared to various liquors

Four Ways to Improve Your Health

Four of your best friends

I scanned this illustration from a 1924 health textbook. Isn't it cute? And I don't think that any modern doctor would disagree with its message:  On the road to Health, four of your best friends are:

• Pure food
• Fresh air
• Exercise
• Rest

This drawing reminds me a little of Dorothy and her friends on the road to the Emerald City in the Land of Oz.

From: 

Healthy Living Book 2:  Principles of Personal and Community Hygiene by Charles-Edward Amory Winslow, Dr. P .H. Copyright 1924. Published by Charles E. Merrill Company, New York and Chicago.