Yeah, I’m aware that the main ingredient was alcohol. That’s why I said arsenic was the “active” ingredient, and not the main one. Most of them were 95% alcohol-- and 3% some kind of syrup for flavor. The other 2% was whatever was actually supposed to help you.
Of course, modern pills have a lot of binders, sugars (to stimulate digestion, apparently), coatings, dyes (there are good reasons for making the 10mg pill a different color from the 5mg) and preservatives, so the actual medicine is probably just a small part of the pill as well.
I wonder if patent medicine makers started using alcohol for it’s antiseptic qualities and ability to dissolve things that won’t break down in water, and then discovered that people would buy the product for the alcohol alone, or if they were cynically distributing liquor from the very beginning.