A reader browsing through Burke’s Landed Gentry in 1866, or reading the Surrey Advertiser – or, ’tis said, a hundred other newspapers and magazines – would have encountered an advertisement:
DR J. COLLIS BROWNE’S CHLORODYNE
the great specific for CHOLERA, DIARRHOEA, DYSENTERY.
GENERAL BOARD OF HEALTH, LONDON, REPORT that it
ACTS AS A CHARM, one dose
generally sufficient.
Dr Gibbon, Army Medical Staff, Calcutta, states,
‘TWO DOSES COMPLETELY CURED ME OF DIARRHOEA’
Dr Browne did not restrict himself to catering to English people’s obsession with their bowels.
Dr J. Collis Browne’s Chlorodyne is the true palliative in
NEURALGIA, GOUT,
CANCER, TOOTHACHE, RHEUMATISM
… a liquid medicine which assuages PAIN OF EVERY KIND,
affords a calm refreshing sleep WITHOUT HEADACHE and
INVIGORATES the nervous system when exhausted
… rapidly cuts short all attacks of EPILEPSY, SPASMS, COLIC,
PALPITATION, HYSTERIA
There followed an ‘Important Caution’ that drops a hint about problems that Dr Browne was having with his competitors.
The immense sale of the REMEDY has given rise to many
UNSCRUPULOUS imitations.
DR J. C. BROWNE (Late Army Medical Staff) DISCOVERED A
REMEDY to denote which he coined the word CHLORODYNE.
Dr Browne is the SOLE INVENTOR, and, as the composition of
Chlorodyne cannot possibly be discovered by Analysis
(organic substances defying elimination), and since the
formula has never been published, it is evident that any
statement to the effect that a compound is identical with
Dr. Browne’s Chlorodyne must be false.
This caution is necessary as many persons deceive purchasers
by false representations.
Vice-Chancellor Sir W. PAGE WOOD stated publicly in
Court that
DR. J. COLLIS BROWNE was UNDOUBTEDLY the INVENTOR OF
CHLORODYNE, that the whole story of the defendant Freeman
was deliberately untrue and he regretted to say it had been
sworn to. – See The Times, 13 July 1864
Most of what we know of Dr Browne, apart from the fact that he lived in Ramsgate and died in 1884, comes from the ads. Yet his remedy lives on, its popularity down the years assured by its none-too-secret ingredient, morphine. It’s not surprising that he had to fight off competition. As GPs were told on a recent postgraduate course, ‘If you were a general practitioner in London in 1850, just about the only things you had in your pharmacopoeia that actually worked were opium for treating diarrhoea, rhubarb for treating constipation, and J Collis Brown’s Chlorodyne, which contained morphine, ether, cannabis and treacle and certainly should have had a generally cheering effect.’
The mixture continued to contain morphine until the 1960s when the Home Office discovered that many pensioners were addicted to the contents of a small brown bottle that was readily available over chemists’ counters, was relatively cheap, and made them very happy. The morphine was removed but the mixture continued to sell.
The strangest thing about Dr Browne’s creation is not the length of its survival – the morphine and the cannabis ensured that – but the endorsements printed in the leaflet that was still packed with it in the 1970s long after it had been reformulated.
Edward Whymper, Esq, the celebrated mountaineer, writes on February 16, 1897, ‘I always carry Dr J Collis Browne’s Chlorodyne with me on my travels, and have used it effectively on others on Mont Blanc.’
‘During my fifteen years’ active service in South Africa, I found your medicine of the greatest value to myself and comrades.’
– Troop Sgt A E Rogers et al, Kitchener’s Fighting Scouts.
‘Gaunter and gaunter grew the soldiers of the Queen. Hunger and sickness played havoc with those fine regiments. But somehow the RAMC managed to patch the men up with chlorodyne and quinine.’
– Cassell’s History of the Boer War, page 542.
That 1970s leaflet was a symptom of an even stranger phenomenon: the negligible effect the pharmaceutical revolution of the second half of the twentieth century had on the ‘household remedies’ sold in chemists’ shops. These nostrums seemed to rely for their appeal more on nostalgia – ‘the treatment mother gave me’ – than on modern pharmacology.
In 1983, the year that pharmacists were at last granted permission to sell drugs previously available only on prescription, middle-aged shoppers could create a litany of nostalgia just by reading the labels on the shelves at their local chemist’s: Elliman’s Universal Embrocation, Scott’s Emulsion, Iron Jelloids, Andrew’s Liver Salts, Veno’s Lightning Cough Cure, Potter’s Catarrh Pastilles, Milk of Magnesia, Lofthouse’s Original Fisherman’s Friend …
Even the descriptive words and phrases on the labels came from the pre-pharmaceutical years: rubbing oils, camphor, balsam, teething jelly, ‘children’s cooling powders’, capsicum and eucalyptus, iron tonic and syrup of figs …
Read out loud, they sound like lines from a Betjeman poem, evoking sun-kissed days when Len Hutton was at the Oval, Henry Hall was on the wireless, the Wizard and the Hotspur were on the counter in the corner shop, and Robert Donat, Jean Harlow and Will Hay were on the silver screen.