[Vwoolf] puple haze

[Jeremy Hawthorn]

I'm reading at the moment Kate Atkinson's novel /Emotionally Weird/, 
which is set in 1970s Dundee (Scotland). It includes an account of a 
student boiling down some "Dr Chloris Brown's Mixture" to get at the 
drug in it (morphine I think). This patent medicine goes way back, I 
think to the 19th century, and still exists, although I think that it no 
longer contains anything exciting that can be accessed by boiling down. 
I remember that it did work very well with stomach upsets. And today 
there is a specific cough mixture that you can obtain from chemists 
(drug stores) here in Norway that contains some morphine. You have to 
show ID when you buy it and you are duly recorded on the computer so 
that you can't buy multiple bottles to  get high.

As for the purple staining stuff, it comes back to me that it was daubed 
on the feet to treat athlete's foot. Dabbing anything on the eyelids 
sounds rather dodgy.

Jeremy H


Den 13/05/2015 09:29, skrev Stuart N. Clarke:
> I’m off to London this morning (where I will have limited internet 
> access), so – you will be pleased to know – I don’t have the time to 
> slip into an anecdotal rant about patent medicines and my childhood, 
> but here is the beginning of A. E. Housman’s parody of Henry Wadsworth 
> Longfellow’s ‘Excelsior’:
>
> The shades of night were falling fast,
>
> And the rain was falling faster,
>
> When through an Alpine village passed
>
> An Alpine village pastor:
>
> A youth who bore mid snow and ice
>
> A bird that wouldn’t chirrup,
>
>
>     /And a banner with a strange device—/
>
> ‘Mrs. Winslow’s soothing syrup’.
>
> Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup contained sulphate of morphia, sodium 
> carbonate, spirits of foeniculi, and aqua ammonia.It was specifically 
> recommended for babies.
>
> Stuart

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