Goode Olde Medicine: I picked up a photograph to decorate my office walls at an art fair today. It's a photo of a collection of old medicine bottles from the patent medicine era. Among "Pink Pills for Pale People" and "Linaments for Man and Beast," there's this cough syrup:



Alcohol, cannabis, chloroform and morphine. That'll cure what ails you. Or at least make you not notice. There's a reason they call them the "good old days."

You can't see this in the detail, but the directions include dosing instructions for children as young as one year of age. Yikes.