Glass and British pharmacy, 1600-1900 : a survey and guide to the Wellcome Collection of British glass / J.K. Crellin and J.R. Scott.

  • Wellcome Institute of the History of Medicine
Date:
1972
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Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Credit: Glass and British pharmacy, 1600-1900 : a survey and guide to the Wellcome Collection of British glass / J.K. Crellin and J.R. Scott. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    phe of handling the viscous, sticky preparations. Both the 1830s’ °, though, judging from the containers that survive, glass soon became the most popular. Although blue became particularly associated with syrup bottles (no particular reason has been found for this), the colour was also used for other medicaments, notably poisons. b. Poison bottles The 19th-century use of special storage bottles for poisons is a long story of individual effort and general dilatoriness. Griffenhagen, in a well- illustrated article, has drawn. attention to a host of ideas for poison bottles, for instance, stoppers bearing spikes, or depicting a skull and cross bones’!. Griffenhagen’s study concentrated on 19th-century America, and on Britain in the middle years of the 19th century when the demand for special poison containers was becoming fairly widespread. However, they had been available many years before and the earliest illustration of a distinctive bottle is possibly in A. Duncan’s Edinburgh New Dispensatory of 18037?. By the 1860s hexagonal fluted bottles appeared in the catalogues of W. C. Beatson, and Maw & Son’®. This fluted bottle was designed by John Savory and William Robert Barker who, in 1859, were granted a patent for a bottle of ‘six, eight, or more sides, and fluted vertically, horizontally, or diagonally; or may be embossed, or otherwise ornamentally raised on the outer surface, leaving a blank space for placing the label with instruc- tions &c.’’*. The intended use of these bottles was for dispensed medicines, ie medicines taken away by the patient, and it is interesting that the hexagon or pentagon shape remained in common use for dispensed medicines until well into this century. In contrast, cylindrical ribbed bottles were more generally used for storing poisons within the shop, though, naturally enough, hexagonsand pentagons were often called into shop use, especially for small quantities’*. But in addition to cylindrical bottles a host of other shapes was introduced, or at least commented on, in the pharmaceutical literature of the time. Some of the more elaborate have been noted by Griffenhagen (skull and cress bones, etc), though few of these specialised bottles remain, suggesting that they did not become generally popular or were prototypes. One possible reason for this was alternative and cheaper methods of discriminating bottles used for poisons, such as attaching strips of sand- paper’®. More important, however, was that the use of special poison bottles did not become man- datory (and even then only if special cupboards were not used) until 1899, though provisions for .- regulations had been made in the far-reaching storage should be tied over, capped, locked or otherwise secured in a manner different from that in which other articles are kept’”’. The main reason for the thirty year delay was opposition by certain chemists and druggists, notably over the proposed measures for inspection to ensure that the regulations were enforced’ 8, However, by 1899 opposition to the regulations had declined — it being evident that many chemists and druggists were already using special bottles, or keeping the more dangerous substances in special ‘poison cupboards’’®. Even so, there still arose a big demand for poison bottles following the 1899 regulations, and, judging from advert- isements and surviving containers, the green cylindrical poison bottle grew in popularity, competing with the blue glass bottles which had probably been the most popular in the 19th century. Nevertheless, blue bottles did not dis- uncommon, though they were certainly less popu- lar, perhaps because they were far less attractive than those of blue and green glass. Dispensary containers Safety bottles for poisons serve to introduce the paraphernalia of dispensing and small-scale manufacturing. During most of the period being considered, dispensing of medicines was in full public view, utilising the ordered arrangement of bottles and drawers etc. For the less conscientious this had disadvantages as Feldmann highlighted. Describing what he saw in one shop he remarked: After taking two extracts, one from a pot of gentian... [the apothecary] put them into a mortar, pouring upon them an ad libitum quan- tity of aqua Menthae ... and then mixed it for some time, during which he conversed with his patient; he next took a powder from a drawer, threw it into the mortar and continued to pound... He then poured the whole into a bottle which became half full. [To this was added laudanum and the contents of several other bottles]. At length the phial was filled to the brim, to do this I saw him take several syrups from different pots, which, before he replaced he cleaned with his tongue... When proceeding to cork the phial [the one he took upon trial was] found to be too large, he began to compress it with his teeth; this he did with three or four corks in succession until he found one which fitted; the other corks besmeared with his saliva, were then again deposited in the drawer ®°. . It was perhaps a relief to many that the trend of