Down the Rabbit Hole: Vinol, Antique Medicines, and Vintage Ads
Written by Laura VanZant, Assistant Curator
Welcome to our new blog series, Down the Rabbit Hole! Sometimes, researching one thing turns into reading about something else, and suddenly an hour has passed and you don’t know how you got onto the topic of 19th century hair wreathes… but these side quests make for great tea room discussions! Now, we’re taking you into the rabbit hole with us as we write about whatever tangent we’ve gone on recently.
A good portion of side quests start with the newspapers. Writing Glimpses of the Past is a great way for us here at the museum to learn more about events, businesses, and vintage local gossip, but there are also a plethora of other topics that can spark our interest as we attempt to write the weekly column.
Which brings us to this week’s topic, Vinol.
The April 29th, 1916 edition of the Revelstoke Mail Herald newspaper had the following advertisement:
Now, I have a bit of a thing for vintage medicines, so of course I had to go find out more about this Vinol being peddled to overworked mothers (who probably needed a nap, a solid meal, and 5 minutes of peace and quiet.)
The National Museum of American History had an entire page for Vinol that even went so far as to list the ingredients it contained! Suddenly, I understood why the aforementioned mother was feeling so much better. Among other things, she was drinking a cocktail of:
10% alcohol
nux vomica better known as strychnine
cascara (the dried outer pulp and skin of coffee cherries, that does contain caffeine)
syrup of wild cherry (I can only assume this was for taste)
Taken as recommended, the lucky patient would consume a tablespoon of this concoction after each meal and at bedtime. It would swiftly cure conditions of general weakness, anemia, exhaustion, “lack of animation” (which sounds like a fancy word for depression), and loss of appetite.
And yes, if you were wondering, this was in fact good for the whole family! In fact, there are dosage instructions on the bottle for children as young as 2 years old.
Further down in the same edition of the Mail-Herald, readers could find this matching advertisement to the one above, but encouraging parents to give Vinol to their delicate, weak children to make then hearty and hale. Was it really as miraculous as it claimed, or did Mr. Bews just order too much stock for his drugstore?
The elixir of life itself, Vinol! Image from the National Museum of American History.