Well, it is from 2002 which in internet time is an eon.
My parents never used mercurochrome for my injuries as by the time I existed no one was using mercurochrome for injuries.
It has been ten years.
Good catch!
:smack:
I grew up in Oklahoma, and we called it Monkey Blood.
My family is 6 generations Fort Worth area and also called it “Monkey Blood”. I guess it is a regional thing.
Mom wasn’t a fan of mercurochrome (thought it was a waste of money, and she was pretty much right) so I always tried to make sure I injured myself at my best friend’s house, where her mom had multiple bottles of the stuff.
And whaddaya mean you can’t find mustard plaster? You can by mustard powder at any supermarket. Add a little flour, if you like, and then water. Bam! Ya got a mustard plaster. http://tipnut.com/mustard-plaster/
And there are dozens of linimentsstill being sold. Mine’s better than all of them, though. 
Phisohex can be lethal through skin absorption. I’m rather glad Clearsil replaced it. It is still available as a prescription though, so if you’re really jonesing for harsh skin cleaners, talk to your doctor.
Today while having stitches on my finger removed at my work dispensary, the doctor, who must have been at least as old as me (I’m 51), spread some medical stuff on it that looked reddish brown, and I remarked that it looked like monkey blood. He asked what that was and I told him it was mercurochrome, used back when I was a kid. He lit up saying, “Oh yeah, I remember that stuff. Good antibiotic, but was banned for having mercury in it. You taught me something today.”
It made me wonder how far the nickname monkey blood had spread. As I can see in this thread that it appears to be a southern related nickname, but I was born and raised near Seattle, WA, and every kid in town called it monkey blood. So it must have spread to other areas of the country too.
I’m also from South Texas. I’ve never heard monkey blood in English, but it was called sangre de chango when I was growing up, which is the same thing in Spanish. I never realized that the term was used in English as well.
How long ago did they stop using mercurochrome? I’ve never heard of it, let alone that it was called monkey blood.
It was banned when they found it spread the zombie infection.
I use the term “monkey blood” but it refers to any red syrup that you’d put on top of ice cream.
I’m from the north-east of the UK so don’t know how regional that is.
I’ve never heard of mercurochrome or the name “monkey blood”, but apparently you can buy it in the UK. The “traditional” antisceptic here is TCP, which is phenol-based and stinks to high hell.
I can’t believe that people would cover themselves with something containing mercury. Was it not common knowledge in those days that mercury is toxic? (According to a google search, its toxicity was discovered way back in 1926.)
Back in the 60’s and 70’s the stuff that construction crews sprayed on freshly poured concrete slabs to help them cure properly was universally referred to as “monkey blood”.
Don’t know if that is still the case, however. Been out of that business a looooong time.
Just adding another data point: I’m a Texan and I learned the term monkey blood for mercurochrome from my mom, though I think I only had it used on me a couple of times and that was at my grandparents’ house.
In the sixties and seventies when I was little in the Washington, D.C. and Dallas/Fort-Worth areas, if I or one of the neighborhood brats got a small cut it would get swabbed in “monkey blood” - Merthiolate or Mercurichrome - from a small bottle kept in the medicine cabinet, followed by a band-aid.
I’m not sure why but it seems we grew out of this practice by the time I was in high school in 1974 - maybe because I was more appearance-conscious by then and didn’t want to advertise with a garish visual announcement what by then was deemed childish clumsiness, or maybe it was avoidance of what might have been seen as a maudlin appeal to sympathy, or maybe it was due to a newfound awareness of the benefits of letting minor wounds heal on their own with exposure to air and sunshine while keeping them washed and dried, or maybe it was a newfound general apprehension regarding exposure to mercury (it seems that Phisohex also disappeared at about this same time); I suspect it was a combination of all of the preceding.
Lots of stuff is toxic if you ingest it in heavy enough concentrations - alcohol is one example.
The toxicity of mercury applied topically in commercially-available concentrations is unproven i.e. it doesn’t appear to be a problem, so people used it for it clearly demonstrable antiseptic benefits, particularly at a time when life-threatening infections such as tetanus, gangrene and anthrax weren’t too distant a memory and were perceived as posing by far the greater risk.
We used both Merthiolate and Mercurochrome; until now I never heard of “monkey blood.” We also used to play with mercury from broken thermometers, and were exposed to leaded paint.
This explains a lot.
All I remember of this is when one summer I was running up the stairs barefoot And I stripped and tore the nail off my second toe and my Busha put some on my toe but when my dad room me to my doctor’s office he wanted it off my toe!!! It took my dad, and three other people to hold me down while he cleaned it off, I was six and I still remember it 46 plus years later! I milked it up, after I got home I climbed onto her lap and cried laying a guilt trip!
Not much that I can add to this conversation but to let you know some history of the drug. It is widely mentioned on the MAS*H series. During the ere discovered by Hugh H. Young in 1918, as a medical aid as an antiseptic. In the USA (FDA) moved it from the “generally recognized as safe” classification into the “untested” in some bureaucratic concerns over the mercury in the product. Trying to locate the percentage of mercury in the solution but can’t seem to find it… But pretty sure its only about 1% or something… If anyone can find it post it… Any way in 1998 the FDA outlawed the sale of Mercurochrome, Germany, and France have also followed, But the rest of the world, it is still sold, and used quite frequently under the same name as well as Merbromin (marketed as Mercurochrome, Merbromine, Sodium mercurescein, Asceptichrome, Supercrome, Brocasept and Cinfacromin) Side bar story many grandmothers threw out the United States used to call it ‘Monkey Blood’ my assumption is that the antiseptic has a red color to it.