Vick’s doesn’t expire! Nor does a jar ever seem to run out completely.
I actually had a glass jar of Vapo Rub that I took with me when I moved out of my mom’s house in 1980 and finally gave up on in 1990, when I opened it up to apply some to my toddler and discovered it was somehow liquid. I tossed the replacement (plastic) jar sometime in the 2010’s because it had accumulated more cat hair than I was willing to work around and replaced it with the smallest size I could find. I imagine that I’ll need one more to see me through the rest of my life.
As of my retirement from pharmacy in 2012, paregoric had not been available for several years, probably because there was so little demand, no manufacturer wanted to make it.
I did dispense it a few times, and it smelled (and probably tasted) terrible, which was to reduce its likelihood of misuse. We had a technician who was near retirement age, and she said that when her kids were little, in the 1960s, she could buy a small amount from behind the counter without a prescription, and she rubbed it on their gums when they were teething. (The camphor also has a numbing effect, as does the alcohol.)
One of my Facebook friends, a HS classmate, has 3 grown children, and she had to call poison control once for each of them. She had caught one child eating Vicks VapoRub, another had eaten some other nonfood product, and the third one had spilled table salt on the floor, and was licking it up. Guess which one she said was the only one to worry about? Yep, the table salt. They told her about the symptoms of hypernatremia, and to take her to the ER if she had any of them, but she didn’t.
Forcing salt water on children was recommended by some people to induce vomiting back in the day if they possibly swallowed something poisonous, but that isn’t recommended any more, and one of the reasons is because children had died from hypernatremia and/or hyperchloremia because they didn’t throw it up.
The wife has a t least 4 variations on Tiger balm, both liquid and salve. They are varying strengths. For simple upset tummy I like Saltines or sourdough pretzels. The pretzels work in minutes for me.
I seem to remember it having a kind of licorice smell and taste.
Someone above mentioned Coca Cola syrup. I had a terrible case of food poisoning sometime in the early 1970s. For two days, all I could keep down was Coca Cola syrup. It was available at the local small pharmacy (as were pints of booze for Sunday sales, back when the blue laws were still in effect here in Massachusetts.)
My father has been hospitalized several times for critically low sodium levels, as was his mother, and I trend low, so I need to eat extra sodium which I know is unusual for people my age. Anyway, when Grandma was still with us, she was living in a nursing home but had to go to the hospital to have her sodium levels corrected, and he told me, “Next time I visit, I’m going to bring a bottle of salt tablets with me, and give them to her nurse and tell her to make sure my mother takes them.” I replied, “I understand where you’re coming from, but she can’t have something like that without a doctor’s order.”
I still use Vicks. When I’m stuffed up, I dab some under my nostrils before bed. When I was a kid, my mom or grandma would rub Vicks on my back and chest and then wrap a towel or piece of flannel around my body and fasten it with a giant safety pin.
My Italian grandma lived a very short distance from us. The yards were connected by a little path. When we kids were in the throws of a stomach ache or some other illness we would head to grandma’s. She’d warm up blackberry brandy or her homemade anisette in a little sauce pan on the stove then give it to us in a shot glass to sip on. We had a lot of stomach aches
Maybe (I think) it was here on the Dope where it was first revealed, but in the early days of the World Wide Web there was a book out called Borehole! that described a couple of trepanning enthusiasts. I think they were British, or rather the UK took a dim view of their DIY skull drilling antics and denied them entry. They gave a bit by bit (heh) account of the difficulties encountered when drilling a hole in one’s head after taking a tab of L.S.D.
I’d have to say my [pseudo] “favorite” retro remedy is one I used to compound for terminal cancer patients to relieve severe pain, way back when I was a pharmacist—Brompton’s Cocktail.
Trust me, Brompton is a cocktail with a bit more kick than what you’re likely to find at your local pub (it laughs at lightweights like Paregoric). It’s a blessing to patients with recalcitrant pain and a coveted treasure for crazy partiers. Or, it can be a death sentence for abusers.
Brompton has a history (hence “retro”): the first record of the combined use of morphine and cocaine appeared in the British Medical Journal in 1896.
