The Story of our Health Message

The Family Medicine Chest

With sickness so prevalent, and with the natural reluctance to call for the services of a physician except as a last resort, it was inevitable that home remedies should be eagerly sought. The nature of these may be learned by perusing the pages of books especially prepared for family reference in case of sickness. SHM 21.1

Let us look inside one such work, one bearing the imposing name of The Family Medicine Chest Dispensatory. This book was published in 1835. Here are recommended various standard assortments of medicines. The first is “for a physician practicing in the country” and is priced at $100. For this he may secure forty-eight bottles of medicine, fifty-three wide-mouthed bottles of powders, etc., besides various and sundry ointments and miscellaneous substances. For the convenience of the physician both the common name and the Latin term for prescription use were given. Adapted either for the physician or for the family, there were other assortments of medicine graded in size and cost to suit the financial status of nearly everyone. SHM 21.2

In an introductory paragraph the following caution is given: “The least active remedies operate very violently on some individuals, owing to a peculiarity of stomach, or rather disposition of body, unconnected with temperament. This state can only be discovered by accident or time; but when it is known, it should always be attended to by the practitioner.”—Family Medicine Chest Dispensatory. SHM 21.3

It was deemed advisable to give special warnings against some of the drugs included in the sets designed for family use; and the readers were informed that “medicines, such as the mercurial salts, arsenic, etc., are apt to accumulate in the system, and danger may thence arise if the doses too rapidly succeed each other. The action also of some remedies, elaterin and digitalis, for example, continues long after the remedy is left off, and therefore much caution is requisite in avoiding too powerful an effect by a repetition of them even in diminished doses.”—Ibid., 19, 20. SHM 21.4