Medicine in the 1900s was confutable . It pretty much consisted of hard drug render far beyond fair dose , and for almost any ailment , cocaine or opioids were just the affair you needed . Whether they worked is a prospicient conversation ( they did n’t ) , but one thing is for certain – they looked like a good time .
Perhaps nothing was quite as good a time , though , as this “ One Night Cough Syrup ” from the former 19th C that has latterly gone viral online for its questionable ingredients . Listed as the main components are 1 percent alcohol , cannabis indica , chloroform , and “ morphia ” ( an old term for morphine ) . If you were having a disturbed night ’s sleep , it ’s leisurely to see how this would do the conjuring trick .
It ’s unclear quite when the nursing bottle was made , but Kohler Manufacturing made this sirup from the eighties onwards and these types of syrup were distinctive throughout the 1900s . All that is clear is that this particular sirup was made after 1906 , as it is abiding by the “ Food and Drugs Act 1906 ” , which prohibited the outlaw motility of food and drink in the US .
Alcohol, cannabis, chloroform, and morphine sounds like a good time. Image Credit: Jonathan Harford/FlickrCC-BY-NC 2.0
Interestingly , while the sirup seems mind - boggling to us , it was highly typical of cough medicines at the time . Morphine , diacetylmorphine , and other poppy derivatives were used for pain curtailment and to stop cough . Chloroform also supposedly help with coughs and made the patient sleepyheaded ( maybe a bit too sleepy ) , and alcoholic beverage and cannabis helped take the boundary off , again to help eternal rest .
Opioids became more regulated and trichloromethane use was stopped after the FDA found it increased risk of cardiac collar and cancer in 1976 , so cough syrups made a large pivot in the late 1900s , but there are plenty of examples of these wild therapeutic still entire .
