Purely for medicinal purposes...

 In my youth, my parents always slept in on weekends, while I was required to rise early, to fetch in the paper, I was allowed to read it, and on Sundays, I burrowed into Leon Gellert's humorous column in the Sunday Herald, and learned some unusual phrases. With Gellert, any spirituous consumption always featured (for medicinal purposes only), and I made that phrase my own, no doubt confusing a few adults, given that I did this from age six.

Right now, I am revising a history of quack medicine called Not Your Usual Treatments, and the phrase bobbed up, unbidden, as I waded into this little historical vignette:

William Hogarth, ‘Gin Lane’, showing the harm alcohol could do. Top left, a woman is pawning her possessions so she can buy gin.

A recipe for curing swetty feet. One ounce of salts desolved in a pint of boyling water, then add the quantity of gin, for to make it pleasant to drink, then drink a wine glass full when required.

According to my notes, that advice came from the notebook of Police Constable Lewis Jones, who was stationed at Gorseinon, near Swansea in Wales in 1859. Personally, I would have left out the salts, and saved time by not diluting the gin. Some medical experts felt that alcohol was bad, others swore by it.

Frederic Skey (1798–1872) was a proud surgeon and a Fellow of the Royal Society. In 1867, he published some lectures to students in which he urged the use of alcohol, in moderation, though his idea of moderation would probably take his patients to a point where they would not be legally allowed to drive in most jurisdictions.

… I am of opinion that for the purposes of health three or four glasses of wine is the maximum quantity that, taken at any one time, can be serviceable. All beyond this, answers the purpose of luxury and nothing more, and is more or less injurious.”*

A couple of pages later, he expressed his pleasure at the fourfold increase in the consumption of wine and brandy in the London Hospitals over the previous forty years. He told how, in 1848, the treasurer at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital commented on the quantity of wine Skey ordered for his patients. It was too great an expense, the treasurer complained, adding that they bought three pipes of wine each year.

Skey reacted as only an old-style alpha male God-surgeon would. He replied sternly that he hoped to raise the level to 13 pipes a year, and in 1867 he reported with some glee that a new treasurer had recently confirmed that they had reached that level. Skey then offered a case study and an example.

A man with hydrothorax had a pulse of 130 after having six pints (about 3 litres) of fluid drained from his chest. Skey prescribed one ounce of brandy in the same amount of water, every three hours, and the following day, the man’s pulse was 90. He concluded triumphantly that “If this treatment was not sound, it ought to have proved fatal.”

He cited a former colleague, the late Mr Jones of Jersey, who had cut off 25 diseased joints without losing a single patient. Jones always gave each patient on whom he operated at least a pint of port wine on each of the two days following the operation, a practice he adopted after seeing Skey’s success with similar treatments.

It is not a coincidence that many of Australia’s earliest vineyards were established by doctors, Dr Hardy, Dr Lindeman and Dr Penfold among them. Mind you, plenty of people argued that used the right way, water could achieve useful cures as well.

Most doctors favoured alcoholic drinks as solvents and “vehicles”, a word we have already seen used by Robert Boyle to mean something which carries the dose. One example is chalybeate wine, which a 1747 recipe says is made by adding four ounces of iron filings, a half ounce each of cinnamon and mace to two quarts of Rhenish wine. This was left to stand for a month and used as appropriate.

Colin Mackenzie suggested that a pregnant patient suffering hysteria or fainting should be placed in a horizontal position in the open air, and when she recovers a little, be given a glass of wine in a little cold water.

One big alcohol problem in the 19th and 20th centuries was that “tonics” were on sale, mainly to women, and these were quite alcoholic. More importantly, they carried no warnings about the alcohol content, nor indeed, was there anything about any other drugs that might be in the bottle.

In 1913, a British doctor was reported as saying that a number of “… cases of inebriety owed their origin to indulgence in some form or other of medicated or tonic wine.” Here is an example from Women's Weekly, of an advertisement for an Australian tonic, which was on sale at least into the 1960s: depending on the source you consult, Wincarnis contained somewhere between 14% and 17% alcohol.

“Will my appetite never return?” Women whose daily housework takes heavy toll of their energy should eat well and should enjoy their food. Only in this way can vital good health be maintained — health to complete the hardest day’s work without tiring, health to enjoy leisure hours. By enriching the blood and renewing tissues you will fully regain your appetite. No more pleasant or more effective way to “tone” up your system, to induce sleep and to make work a pleasure than by relying on the curative properties of Wincarnis. Get a bottle from your chemist today. Prices: 4/3 pints, 7/3 quarts. Over 20,000 Recommendations from Medical men. WINCARNIS must do you good! **

——————————————————

*    “… I am of opinion that for the purposes of health three or four glasses…”, F. C. Skey, FRS, Hysteria: remote causes of disease in general treatment by tonic agency, 1867, 15.

**    “Women whose daily housework takes heavy toll of their energy should eat well…”, The Australian Women’s Weekly, 18 May 1935, 46S, http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/51757935