Oh, what must it have been like before the FDA, back when any snake-oil salesman could cook up some cockamamie brew and sell it as medicine. Making outrageous claims for its miraculous benefits. And not just on April Fool’s Day. A quick internet search for some of these 19th- and early-20th-century elixirs finds ingredients more likely to be found on the streetcorner these days than in a pharmacy. For example, Psychine. The bottle is pretty (and I kept it in a window for years) but Dr. T. A. Slocum’s claims that it cures “consumption and all disorders of the throat & lungs” (when “taken in conjunction with his compound emulsion of pure cod liver oil and hypophosphites of lime and soda”) seem questionable. (The bottle has been passed on to my friend Marin, who sometimes prefers to go by the name Psychine these days, opting for a French pronunciation that I won’t even try to type phonetically here.)
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