A Look Back at Victorian Age Medicine

HAZARD OF THE MONTH

While documenting the hazards on display in the South Africa Galleries, the National Collection Hazard Management Project team found RELAWM15682, a Personal First Aid Kit, which was carried by Daily Telegraph correspondent Frank Wilkinson during his time reporting on the Boer War. The medical kit was manufactured in 1901 by BURROUGHS  WELLCOME & CO of London. The buckled folding leather case houses 16 ebony wood screw top vials with gold lettering above a paper label with the content and directions for the ‘tabloids’ it contained within.

With medical science at the forefront of our minds at the moment, this medical kit shows us just how far we’ve come in 120 years!

The kit contains a few notable medicines, all in tablet form.

• Potassium permanganate, a tablet that can be dissolved in water or alcohol to sanitize.
• Iron and Arsenic tabloids could have been used to treat fever or asthma.
• Warburg Tincture, which contains quinine in addition to various purgatives, aromatics and carminatives. Warburg's tincture was well known in the Victorian era as a medicine for fevers, especially tropical fevers, including malaria.
• Calomel (mercurous chloride) for treatment of fever by purging or laxative.
• Dover Powder (ipecacuanha, powdered opium) for the treatment of fever, to induce sweating, to defeat the advance of the cold chills and at the beginning of any attack of fever.
• Livingstone Rousers, made with quinine, jalap, rhubarb and calomel to treat Malaria, but also good for ‘rousing’ you from a fever while purging the body.
• Chlorodyne, a mixture of laudanum (an alcoholic solution of opium), tincture of cannabis, and chloroform for relieving pain, as a sedative, and for the treatment of diarrhea.

Hard to imagine your doctor prescribing any of those!

The Hazard Management Project team is looking into all of our medical kits, as there are a few risks to be considered with these kinds of items:

• Many pharmaceuticals are controlled substances and the Memorial is required to have licences to hold them in our collection.
• Pharmaceuticals have ‘use by’ dates, and their chemical composition can change as they deteriorate, possibly to more dangerous compounds.
• Names of medication change overtime, and sometimes the product name doesn’t reflect what the product actually is.
• It is important to wear the correct Person Protective Equipment when accessing pharmaceutical collections as during handing some chemicals could be absorbed through the skin or inhaled if powdered.  

Although these kinds of items do pose some challenges for the Memorial, they provide a fantastic look back into how doctors used to help.