Mind your language
I RESOLVE never to mention baume de vie again — after today. But I cannot resist referring to a schedule of Drugs, Herbs, Pills, Waters, Essences, Tinc- tures, Powders, Preparations and Corn- punds upon every Packet, Box, Bottle, Pot, Phial or other Inclosure of which stamp duty was payable under an Act of Parliament of the 44th year of George II's reign (1804).
In the schedule is included Beaume de vie, which we had been trying to track down from a reference to it as bum-taffy by the Welsh servant Win Jenkins in Smollett's novel Humph'', Clinker.
I love lists, and if you do too you may take some pleasure in: Addison's Reani- mating European Balsam, Aethereal Anodyne Spirit, Chapman's Chilblain Water, Ching's Worm Lozenges, Cor- dial Balm of Gilead, Dalmahoy's Taste- less Salts, Dickenson's Red Drops for Convulsions, Earl's Remedy for the Hooping-cough, Edward's Nipple Oint- ment, Freake's Tincture of Bark, Friend to Man, Grand Specific or Infallible Antidote to Consumption, Harvey's Anti-Venereal Pills, Hayward's Samari- tan Water, Hill's Gout Essence, Hoop- er's Female Pills, Imperial Anodyne Opodeldoc, Matthew's Alternative Medicine, Sibley's Lunar Tincture, Solomon's Anti-Impetigines, Spinluff's Aromatic Bilious Cordial, Squirrel's Tonic Pills, Storey's Worm Cakes, Swedish Elixir of Longevity, Tasteless Ague Drops, Waite's Worm Nuts, Ward's Liquid Sweat and Zimmerman's Stimulating Fluid.
My husband tells me some of these worked and some of them definitely did not; he will not say which were which. For extraneous reasons, I rather like another medicine on the schedule: Clin- ton's Oil for Deafness.
The energetic Mr Richard Rose, who cleverly thought of looking up the Act in the library, was taken by Perkins's Metal- lic Tractors, and wonders whether it would be like swallowing a Dinky toy. Luckily, in fact, they were not intended for internal consumption, being a device invented by Elisha Perkins (an American who died in 1799), consisting of a pair of pointed rods of different metals, which were believed to relieve rheumatic or other pain by being drawn or rubbed over the skin. Perkinsean electricity was the New World's answer to Mesmer.
And a healthy New Year to you too.
Dot Wordsworth
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