Dr. Batty is back, with a whole new pile of old-timey pharmeceutical ads for your enjoyment. The good Doctor encourages you to try them all. Not necessarily at the same time, of course. Dr. Batty tried that once and, when he woke up a week later, he was wandering naked down Main Street in Goshen, Indiana with a tattoo of a spider monkey on his left buttock and a very odd growth on his – er – let’s just leave it at “a very odd growth”.
It took two full bottles of Ayers Morphine to calm Mrs. Batty down after that one.
Anyway, let’s start the show:
“Heroin” – a trademark of Bayer AG until WWI.
The advertisement announces that Bayer is “…sending to physicians throughout the United States literature and samples of ASPRIN (and) HEROIN”.
It kinda sounds to me like Bayer was a pusher. (“Pusher” in German: dasdruggensellinbadvolk).
More heroin. Did they live on the stuff? No wonder the 1890’s were the “gay nineties”. Everyone was so fried that it no longer mattered that the streets were full of horse manure, everybody smelled like an outhouse and the air was so full of coal-soot that you could shovel it. A couple shots of cough syrup and everything was soooo much better…
The secret ingredient in Malt-Nutrine? Hint: notice the name of the manufacturer at the bottom right hand corner.
That’s right, it’s booze! Sweet, life-giving booze! “A boon to nursing mothers” indeed. Toss back a couple shots of our tonic mom and you’ll hardly notice the pain as the little monster chews your nipples bloody raw! Then, when the ordeal is finally over, you can hold him up, stare at him with your booze-soaked, glazed-over eyes and wonder again why in the HELL you ever let Charles force his attentions on you that night.
In your bed!
In your own bedroom!
What if the servants had heard?
The beast! The absolute beast.
Well, I’m sure that this is just an anomaly. Surely, turn-of-the-century moms weren’t all on the sauce!
Never mind.
Back to morphine. Sheesh! Heroin – morphine – codeine. Did they get any work done? Ever?
Soothing? You bet. Mrs. Profile is so out of it she hasn’t noticed that an evil midget has crawled into her bed and is copping a feel.
Nembutal was the trade name for pentobarbital, which, as the name suggests, is a barbituate. You will note it is also a suppository. The hook here is that is this is the drug of choice to calm down young patients who are afraid of the doctor.
Well of course it is. Nothing breeds trust for one’s doctor – and completely eliminates future anxiety of medical examinations, I might add – better than shoving 200 milligrams of downers up a kid’s ass.
No long term psychological damage here!
Mary appears to be talking to her crabby, evil self who lives in another dimension.
Alone.
So very, very alone…
Personally, I would have chosen a model whose boobs were not sharing space with her navel. Unless that was a side-effect of using Norodin of course, in which case I salute Endo Products Inc. of Richmond Hills, NY for their truth in advertising.
As far as marketing savvy though? Not so much. But, when you choose “Endo” as your company name (unless you’re selling suicide kits) you’ve pretty much demonstrated that marketing is not your thing.
But then, what do I know?
We do not know what was in Wolcott’s Instant Pain Annihilator. The technology, THANK GOD, has been lost forever. We do know a few things about Wolcott’s Instant Pain Annihilator however:
1) Drinking it, even once, gave every patient – even men – the uncontrollable urge to use Maybelliene “Ruby Rush” lipstick for the rest of their natural lives.
2) Ditto for blush. LOTS of blush.
3) Failing to follow dosage instructions would cause the Dark Lord Wolcott to summon demons from the underworld who would attack you with pick axes, clubs, knives, the Confederate Flag and acrobatic handstands until you drank more of the stuff – AS YOU SWORE ON YOUR ETERNAL SOUL THAT YOU WOULD DO WHEN YOU BOUGHT THE STUFF IN THE FIRST PLACE!!!!!
The Angel of Death sometimes attended these little “shows”, assessing the imps’ performance with a coolly professional eye.
4) Exorcism was the only method knowN to remove the curse of Wolcott’s Instant Pain Annihilator. And that was a 50/50 shot at best.
“Ha-ha – all ready for work dear?!”
“Ha-ha – work? I haven’t worked for months! I’m so fried on ludes that I can’t even make it to the can. There – I just crapped my pants again! Ha-ha! Hell, if you moved this table, I’d pitch over flat on my face, that’s how BAKED I am! And I wouldn’t ever care! Ha-ha!”
“Ha-ha – that’s great dear! I applied varnish to my hair, so it would stay in place and I wouldn’t have to wash it anymore!”
“Ha-ha – more time for ludes!”
“Ha-ha – more time for ludes indeed!”
“Ha-ha – and has little Becky taken her ludes this morning?!”
“Daddy, I don’t want to take ludes no more. They make me feel weird and they taste funny.”
“Ha-ha – quit complaining. You’ve got it easy – ha-ha! When I was your age, my father was ramming Nembutal up my ass three times a day! Ha-ha!”
“Ha-ha – that’s why your sphincter is so loose that you could pass a 16 inch softball without realizing it dear!”
“Ha-ha – that’s right!”
“Ha-ha!”
“Ha-ha!”
Beer does help with milk production. Lots of moms still use it in moderation.
I’ve often thought how great it would be to live in the time when hard drugs were sold over the counter. It explains so much about how people lived through those times.
I remember Miles Nervine ads on TV when I was kid. Other than that, I got nothin’.
So, all these hard drugs were available at one time, and yet civilization didn’t end. Legalize, baby, legalize!
The down side to heroin far outweighs letting it out OTC or even prescribed. There are numerous drugs that do what heroin did — without the junkie side effects. However, when we say they are “no medicinal purposes” — that is legal language under the Controlled Substances Act put in by Congress not a judgment by an MD or a pharmacologist.
Probably the only drugs that don’t have known legitimate medicinal uses are LSD and Ecstasy
I thought both LSD and Ecstasy had some positive results with certain mental illnesses?
But the children, JS, what about the children?!?!? Aw, screw them. Fall for — grumble-grumble — that Obama BS — grumble-grumble…
rinse and repeat.
Oh sure, delete your second response, now mine looks really random.
Civilization didn’t collapse, either, when people regularly got rat crap in their canned food. Personally, I’m kind of glad that sort of thing got regulated. I guess that makes me a pink-o.
I claim neutrality in the legalization war. Except when it comes to Wolcott’s Instant Pain Annihilator – I do not want to live in a society where that stuff is available.
By the by, I am disappointed that we did not get at least one report of a ruined keyboard from a morning coffee spit take. I really thought that the 16 inch softball line would have gotten somebody. Damn it. I’m losing my touch…
(Trzupr dejectedly returns to work).
Rich,
You got audible laughter from me in both pieces but I was not embibing at the time, so no damaged hardware. I’ve learned from reading your prior posts and cover my computer in visquean prior to clicking on the “continue reading” links of anything you’ve written.
OK, I feel better now…
That Wolcott ad is about the coolest thing ever. Me want poster of same.
The Nembutal kid knows what’s coming.
love the cutesy Mary Blair-esque illustration for the kiddie downers. Is the doll where she keeps he stash?
Here’s my favorite old-time medical ad.
I’m pretty sure I swiped it from Lileks.
One the demons on the man’s head is waving what believe is a Confederate flag: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Our_Heroes_and_Our_Flags_1896.jpg