A Maine Family's History: Down East Tales VII

It's been a while since I (Alta altaf@world-net.net) posted the last condensation so an explanation is probably in order. I am a volunteer transcriber of audio tapes of the Alexander-Crawford Historical Society. (Washington County, Maine) These transcriptions which I have condensed are of meetings or interviews with local people, and all date back to the early 1980s. As with previous submissions anything in quotation marks is an exact quote from the tape. Parentheses mean a correction or addition, and something that I couldn't really understand is in italics. Some of the members present at this meeting were Jack Dudley, Jane Dudley, Pliney Frost, and Millie Winckler. This tape is a very interesting, and sometimes amusing, talk by Harold Fenlason of Calais, Maine. It is so lengthy that I have split it into two parts. Mr. Fenlason was a druggist and from the things mentioned on the tape, I'd guess from the early 1900s to maybe the 1940s. When asked about his training as a druggist, he said "I just hung around Fred Twist's store and he showed me."

The tape begins with a discussion of some of the tools of the druggist. They used a torsion balance which wasn't terribly accurate - " not anything like a good analytical balance but pretty fair, and those balances cost about $60.00." They used graduals for liquid measurements. They were made of glass and were tapered with a foot on the bottom, and English measurements on one side and metric on the other. They also used apothecary's weights. There were mortars and pestles of all sizes for mixing. It was a rule to always stir to the left with the pestle. If you stirred to the right, you were considered a rank amateur who didn't know anything about pharmacy. They would scrape the bottom of the mortar with a spatula, and stir some more, and if there were still lumps put the mixture through a sifter.

Ointments were made on a glass. The druggist would start with Vaseline, cold cream, Unguentine, or something similar and then mix in the powder the doctor prescribed to make a special ointment to treat a specific problem. One standby was a sulphur ointment for itch - often made of lard, sulphur and kerosene. A blue ointment with mercury was for lice. It was called Blue Butter. They used funnels, and a hydrometer jar. "This was a cylindrical thing and it was quite high, like this - about that big - and this was for finding specific gravity of liquids. And, you'd have a hydrometer and you'd put the liquid in the jar and drop it in and read it off just about like you do with battery acid now as far as that goes. But, it was bigger." The specific gravity is the measure of strength. If the liquid "had a higher specific gravity, you could translate that into a percentage of strength." The pharmacist used a pill tile, a pill roller and a pill cutter. He had a conceal machine and a suppository machine.

Before Mr. Fenlason's time a percolator was used to "digest drugs with alcohol or alcohol and water and so forth and make a solution of some kind, but that's a very old machine." He made pills. "You'd again put a powder together and you'd use what they called a pill incipient which was a sticky liquid that was used to bind the powder together. Gum Arabic was one and one - I'm going to blow this name, I know - gum trajacins. (Gum tragacanth in my dictionary) That's a terrible word. But, we used those and it helped to bind the powder together and then after you got that all together in a mass, you rolled it out in a roll about like a pencil like this and you rolled it to a certain length, and then you had this pill tile - that's the way I did it. And, you laid it on there and there were little marks all along. Say if you wanted ten pills you'd roll this out until it was ten of those little marks long. take a spatula and cut it off. And, then you'd take these little increments and roll ‘em and you'd come out with a round pill. And we'd use a powder - you'd use a powder after you got all through - like a podian which kept it from sticking. And so, that was a very interesting thing. But, they don't do that any more."

There was a conceal machine. "A conceal was a little rice flour disk, and - well, you know, it was about like this and it came and made a little scoop across and then another little lip and then you could put and seal it together. And, the purpose of those was to put powders in there and then, at least theoretically, the patient swallowed this thing and didn't taste the very bitter powders as they frequently were very bitter." Today when you take a prescription to the drug store you get factory made pills or capsules. In the old days the druggist might give you a fluid extract, tincture, syrup, elixir, powdered extract, or a thing called spirits. Druggists also made "a thing called an emulsion which was a combination of oil and water and it was a very tricky thing to make." An emulsion was "a combination of oil and water put together in a certain routine so it came out creamy. If you didn't do that you just had a mess of oil and water in the bottle." One well known commercial emulsion was Scott's Emulsion which was made with cod liver oil.

For reference the druggists used the Materia Medica, the United States Pharmacopeia, or U.S.P., and the National Formulary, or N.F. They also had Remington's Practice of Pharmacy which combined material from both the U.S.P. and the N.F. Drugs that were commonly kept in the home then were Sweet Spirits of Niter, used for a fever, Paregoric. for a stomach ache, and Ipecac if someone swallowed something they shouldn't, or if they were coughing a lot. "Paregoric's technical name is camphorated tincture of opium". It is a "narcotic but it was sold under the classification of exempt narcotics. What the druggist had to do every time he sold paregoric, say if he sold 72 ounces - he would take their name and write it in a book and say that on such and such a date John Jones got two ounces of paregoric and that was open for inspection to the narcotics fellow who came around. There were certain families, or certain people, who really were what we called paregoric fiends, and their practice was to go from drug store to drug store and if they could con some unsuspecting clerk into selling them four ounces or eight ounces, they'd love it. But, anybody who had been in the drug store any length of time would say ‘Oh, no. I'll give you two ounces. That's it.' Then you could only get two ounces every so often. You'd come in the next day and they'd say ‘No, sorry, can't do it.' But, this paregoric among other things was used to put on baby's or small children's gums . . . when they were cutting their teeth, that's right. Of course, it was a narcotic. It worked very well, and I guess some rather unscrupulous parents were not above giving these little kids a slug of paregoric when they wouldn't go to sleep. I'm sure that was done. Not the best thing to do but they did it."

Laudanum is a tincture of opium. A tincture is an alcoholic solution. Laudanum was used for pain. Narcotics were kept in a special cabinet with glass doors and a lock. The prescriptions for narcotics were kept in a special file. Before Harold Fenlason's time prescriptions were pasted into a book big enough to have 15 or 16 prescriptions on a page. One of the duties of the boy who worked in the drug store was to paste the prescriptions into the book. Millie Winckler interrupted to say: "Harold, do you remember Lomie Laughlin." She paid Millie two cents for taking a prescription for headache powders to the drug store. "I can see him now with his little spatula taking out on the papers so much powder for each one, and I think a dozen powders were ten cents." Harold Fenlason continued with a description of headache powders. He said a big seller locally was Percy L. Lord's headache powders. Percy L. Lord was a Calais druggist. "Headache powders were made of aspirin, acetanilid and caffeine. And, I think in entirety maybe seven and a half grains or something like that. But, in any event this was Percy L. Lord's private formula, and he had little envelopes all printed up with his name on it, Percy L. Lord's Headache Powders." The powders were put on a special paper of a certain size. The papers had to be folded in a certain way. The druggists mixed so many powders that they had to have a "quick way of arriving at the proper amount to put in the paper, and what we did, we took a broom handle and shaved it down until it was - oh, about that big around and tapered a little and then chopped off on the end and then we took a counter-sink. We'd drill into this little broom stick piece - about that long. And, we'd drill in until we thought that was about the size we wanted. Then we would press that into the powder, level it off and dump it on the paper and weigh it. Then we'd keep adjusting, either countersink more or sandpaper some off until that little blob of powder would weigh exactly what we wanted. That's how we made powders. You just slap it into that, dump it out here. That was it. You didn't have to weigh anything. You could make ‘em fast." Another method of dividing powders was "if the powder would stick together at all, you put it in a block, you know, about maybe this size. Then you'd take your spatula and make little marks and then you'd move those out and take each one, and you'd have to check that on the balance and make sure they were pretty close."

Doctors wrote the prescriptions in Latin. "Nobody could understand that except a real professional." Harold Fenlason had taken Latin in high school, "but it had nothing to do with Latin in a drug store, I can tell you. Nothing whatsoever except maybe the endings. But, in a matter of oh-h a few months, I learned all the pharmaceutical Latin that anybody would ever need. Because a good many times it was just a matter of putting ‘um' or ‘ii' or ‘ae' on the end of an English word. Then there were a few trick words that you had to learn. On the bottom of a prescription you have something like M with a line through it - a flourish; "e-t," "s-i-g," two dots and then you'd have a thing that looked like - - there was one dram sideways. O. C. S. . . . So, you'd have that. Then you'd have ‘-i-d-a-c'or yes, ‘-i-d-a-c-d-i-h-s. . . . Now what this meant was you'd have one teaspoon-full three times a day. A-c would be ante cibum which is before meals. P-c would be post cibum which would be after meals. Then you would have an h-s which stood for horum septum or some such thing which meant bed time, anyway. (My dictionary says hor. decub. stands for hora decubitus and means at bedtime.) So you had all this mumbo jumbo stuff and all it meant was take a teaspoon-full three times a day and at bed time." (My dictionary shows the symbol for dram as a number 3 with the top half shaped like the top of a 7. The symbol for ounce is the same as the one for dram but with a line through the top part like a European 7.)

Harold Fenlason told a story about Percy L. Lord. "Percy L. Lord had an open prescription room. You know. There were glass show cases in front, but you would look out into the prescription room. Percy L. Lord was a real act. He was tremendous. And, we made things with liquids a lot, and you'd have a bottle, see, and one of these graduates and Percy L. Lord. . this would be the bottle and let's say this is the graduate. He'd dump it out of the bottle in there and there would be lines on it and he'd go - - must be on the bottom of the meniscus, that's right. (A meniscus is the curved upper surface of a column of liquid.) And, so he'd go like this and he'd go - oh, very serious. And, you know what, he would do that and he'd always over fill it and he'd pour it back in the bottle which nobody ever should do. And, then he'd go back and forth like this and finally - with great gravity - oh, very serious - he would carefully pour that into the four ounce bottle and everybody would say, ‘Oh that Mr. Lord, he's so careful.' So careful, my eye. Any good pharmacist, including Percy L. Lord, would never put it back, and could hit that bottom of the meniscus just right on the button. No problem, you could do it. But, Percy pulled all this nonsense.

And, he was a great old humbug, too, I'm going to tell you. This may bother some people. So anyone used to go in and say, ‘Mr. Lord, I don't feel very good. I got chills. I got fever. I got this and that.' And, he'd say, ‘Yes, well I think I could have a remedy for you.' And, he'd go out back and he'd get a four ounce bottle or a six ounce - four ounce usually - thirty five cents - and he'd go and take off this - go through this same routine - oh very carefully - and put it all and he usually have to put a ‘shake' label on it. Put a little powder in there to make it look good. Now, I - ‘If you take this,'- and he would give them directions and put them on the label - ‘I'm sure you will be helped.' And so they'd go away. They'd take the stuff. They would be helped and they would be very happy. So, the punch line of the story is this. A year later, they'd come back with this bottle and say, ‘Mr. Lord, I need some more of that medicine.' And, it didn't faze Percy L. Lord a bit. He'd say, ‘Hum-m, yes, well,' and so he'd go out in the back room and concoct something else, and come back and he'd say ‘Now, I must explain to you, we have recently had some new shipments of drugs and they are somewhat different, and you may notice that this is a slightly different color or it might be a definitely different color. Don't let that worry you, and you may notice that it doesn't smell exactly the same or it doesn't taste exactly the same, but this is the fault of the new material. This is your prescription.' And, they believed him absolutely. P. L. Lord could do no wrong and they were cured. . . .

And, a wonderful guy. I have nothing but great admiration for P. L. Lord. And, he was a big man of Calais." Every drug store had a shelf of patent medicine, Lydia Pinkham's and Fellow's Compound and others. One was Dr. Williams' Pink Pills for Pale People. There was Piso's Cure for Consumption with the following advertising. "I believe Piso's Cure for Consumption saved my life. The best cough medicine is Piso's Cure for Consumption. Children take it without objection - by all druggists - 25 cents." Many of the patent medicines including Lydia Pinkham's and Atlas Bitters, had a large percentage of alcohol. Harold Fenlason said, "I must note this that there were many of these patent medicines and they were a high alcoholic percentage and people who took these things a lot were running around half drunk most of the time. Maybe, they didn't know they were drunk, but they felt pretty good."

Everyone had to take some "Bitters" in the spring. The worse it tasted, the better it was supposed to be. "It was like putting iodine on a cut - no hurt, no cure." Cascara sagrada was a laxative and a lovely Latin name was Romulus Persiana. Fluid Extract of Romulus Persiana. There were Kickapoo Indian remedies that included Kickapoo Indian Sagwa, Indian Oil, Indian Salve, Indian Cough Cure, and Indian Worm Killer. "They had four or five things and they guaranteed that it would, you know, cure anything." Congress by passing the Pure Food and Drug Act put an end forever to some of the nation's more bizarre nostrums. It was a time of Indian snake root oil, electric belts, tonics and phosphates, pills, powders, elixirs, herb teas and aphrodisiacs. An advertisement for Lydia Pinkham's said, "This applies to women regardless of taste, caste or color. The ambitious girl striving for school honors; the shop girl, anxious, eager, worried, for she must keep her place; the society woman, all climbing too high. What follows? Nervous prostration, excitability, fainting spells, most likely organic diseases of the uterus or womb and many - many other distressing female troubles. Oh, women, if you must bring upon yourselves these troubles, remember that Lydia E. Pinkham's is a vegetable compound that has done more to relieve such suffering than any other remedy known."

Lice remedies were the next thing discussed. A woman told a story that when she was in school and Helen Mahaney was her teacher, there was an epidemic of lice in the class. Miss Mahaney had hair long enough so that she could sit on it, and she caught the lice, too. She told the whole class to go home and that the only ones who could come back to school were the ones who did not have lice. Foster Higgens and the woman telling the story were the only students in the class the next day. Helen Mahaney was a good teacher and the school principal.

The woman telling the story said that many people didn't want to use the Blue Butter lice remedy and they used Quasher Chips. The chips were steeped in water and you soaked your hair in this water. You wore a cap for three days and used vinegar to get rid of the nits. Kerosene was another home remedy for head lice.

Some remedies for rheumatism were: "Wear the eye tooth of a pig. Carry three potatoes in your pants pocket. Carry in your pocket the triangular bone from a ham. Put a copper cent in your shoe. Carry a piece of burn out carbon from the arc light as a prevention or cure for rheumatism. Of course you have to find an arc light in the old cars - might be a little difficult. A ring made of a horse shoe nail is good for rheumatism. Wear a brass ring to cure rheumatism. To prevent rheumatism put glass knobs under the bed posts. Say, that's pretty good. That's easy too. A dried eel skin tied above a joint kills and prevents rheumatism. So all you have to get is a dried eel skin. That'd be pretty good. Do not throw out the water in which you wash your feet in the evening until the next day for fear of rheumatism. That's pretty good. Carry a coffin nail to prevent rheumatism. A salted mackerel tied on the feet cured rheumatism. A raw salt herring with the bone taken out applied to the neck, tie a handkerchief over it and keeping it on all night cures rheumatism. Rheumatism can be cured by sleeping on a sock that contains powdered alum. That would be pretty easy, a little alum. A bee sting will cure rheumatism. Render a buzzard into grease and use this for rheumatism. A red flannel worn about the wrist will cure rheumatism, and it says sleep with a dog to cure rheumatism. The dog will absorb the disease and become crippled."