I have acquired some Nerve & Brain Tonic

Factual Questions
1

I just got a half-full bottle of ‘Dr Bowen’s Nerve & Brain Tonic’ from eBay. I was wondering:

1: When did they stop making this stuff, in general? Judging from the style of the label, I’d place this bottle at around the 1920s or 30s at the latest. Was it made for much longer after that?

2: What’s likely to be in this stuff? Would it be mostly benign ingredients, or might it contain cocaine, arsenic, cobra poison etc?

3 (Sort of related to question 2): Will I die if I taste it? I mean, is tasting 80 year-old nerve and brain tonic merely a bad idea, or is it an extremely bad idea?

Thank you. Also, “It’s like there’s a party in my mouth, and everyone’s invited” - Ken Griffey Jr.

2

If this stuff was made in the US, it’s likely before 1900.

Any indication of city, state, country?

3

Be careful, it has been known to cause gigantism, but only in extreme cases…

4

Ah, they still make the stuff – it just goes by different names. Go into any GNC health food store and you’ll see what I mean.

My guess is that it’s mostly alcohol and people regularly drink ancient bottles of wine. But if it’s half-empty, most of the volatiles have probably evaporated over the years unless it’s really well-sealed. So any anti-bacterial/preservative properties would probably be lost. So I’d be trying this stuff out on the family hamster before trying it myself.

If it’s really old (circa 1890), then cocaine or even laudanum isn’t out of the question.

5

Aconite could be an ingredient well into the 1840’s. Mercury is another possibility. Tasting it would be a VERY bad idea. You probably wouldn’t get enough of a dose to damage you, but heavy metals, for instance, build up over your lifetime. It may not be the dose now that you have to worry about, but the cumulative dose later.

6

“It’s like there’s a party in my mouth, and everyone’s throwing up” - Fry in Futurama

Probably mostly alcohol, with whatever drug was regarded as a cure-all at the time. Laudanum, and later cocaine, were very common.

7

Cannabis was used in many patent medicines in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but oxidation would have diminished all of the active THC by now.

8

Really? Not doubting you at all, but I have a friend who was working at the Australian Museum in the 1980s and he was rummaging through some dried plants from the Nineteenth Century, and there was some cannabis there. He promptly smoked some of it and said it was still potent. Would oxygen only affect it if it was already dissolved in alcohol, not still in its natural state in a dried plant?