[Vwoolf] puple haze

[Mark Hussey]

Well, my dear chemists, I mentioned this thread last night to the mother of
two with whom I live and she instantly said 'had the baby been beaten?'

 

From: Vwoolf [mailto:vwoolf-bounces+mhussey=verizon.net at lists.osu.edu] On
Behalf Of Stuart N. Clarke
Sent: Wednesday, May 13, 2015 4:45 AM
To: vwoolf at lists.osu.edu
Subject: Re: [Vwoolf] puple haze

 

 

 

With the advent of the National Health Service and the need to list
ingredients on bottles and packets, things became increasingly difficult for
this sort of dangerous rubbish.  As Paul Vaughan puts it in his
autobiography, the mid-fifties were:

 

"the end of an era in the pharmaceutical business.  The Celery Tonics,
Soothing Powders, Miracletts and Popular Pellets of yesteryear, the old
survivors from the age of quackery like Fenning's Fever Cure (formula:
powdered dragon's blood) were going the way of Mother Siegel's Syrup and
Keene's One-Night Cold Cure.  The drug industry was now controlled by huge
corporations manufacturing antibiotics and anti-depressants and, gradually,
all the armoury of scientific medicine.  Ahead of them, too, were such
disasters as the thalidomide and chloramphenicol affairs."

(Paul Vaughan, "Exciting Times in the Accounts Department" (London:
Sinclair-Stevenson, 1995), 54.)

 

Stuart (I haven't gone yet.)

 

 

From: Stuart N. Clarke <mailto:stuart.n.clarke at btinternet.com>  

Sent: Wednesday, May 13, 2015 8:29 AM

To: vwoolf at lists.osu.edu 

Subject: Re: [Vwoolf] puple haze

 

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

 

From: Jeremy Hawthorn <mailto:jeremy.hawthorn at ntnu.no>  

Sent: Wednesday, May 13, 2015 7:59 AM

To: vwoolf at lists.osu.edu 

Subject: [Vwoolf] puple haze

 

The overwhelming likelihood, I take it, is that the purple is the result of
some condition such as malnutrition. But I do recall that as a child I was
daubed with various unguents and patent medicines that turned the skin
various colours, including mauve. Do I recall correctly that one of them was
permangunate of potash? Or was that what I used when my goldfish got fungal
infections? Could one of these have been a treatment for sties?

Jeremy H

Den 13/05/2015 08:52, skrev Stuart N. Clarke:

I do take it (from my hunting on the internet) that there need be nothing
exceptional about babies with purple eyelids and therefore the implied
argument is that we should not annotate this.  However, applying the
principle that "nothing is casual in Woolf", I would like to be enlightened
about whether or not there is some special combination of poverty + babies +
purple eyelids!

 

Stuart

  

 

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