By Rebecca Rego Barry — The French physician Louis Auzoux was having trouble sourcing fresh cadavers. It was a common problem for doctors and medical students in the early 19th century, and if they couldn’t dissect the dead, how could they understand the inner workings of the human body? After touring a papier-mâché workshop, Auzoux began experimenting with the medium to create medical "manikins" or anatomical models—not to be confused with mannequins, the life-size human figures used to display clothes. Auzoux's...

How Snake Oil Got a Bad Rap (Hint: It Wasn't The Snakes' Fault)

By Lisa Hix — These days, "snake oil" is synonymous with quackery, the phoniest of phony medicines. A "snake oil salesman" promises you the world, takes your money, and is long gone by the time you realize the product in your hands is completely worthless. But get this: The original snake oil actually worked. Save this one for the next cocktail party; it will blow your friends’ minds. In the 1860s, Chinese laborers immigrated to the United States to work on the Transcontinental Railroad. At night,...

Dueling Dr. Drakes Fight Over Cough Cure-All

By null — One of the liveliest cases in the arcane world of trademark law concerned an early 20th-century dispute between rival patent-medicine peddlers. The lawsuit over Dr. Drake’s German Cough and Croup Remedy set in motion a fight that went all the way to the Ohio State Supreme Court. We found the story in a post by Show & Tell regular, Marianne Dow, at the Findlay Antique Bottle Club blog. The bottle above was once filled with a version of Dr. Drake’s sold by the Glessner Medicine Co.,...

Bill Lindsey on How To Read a Bottle

By Maribeth Keane — My maternal grandfather and uncle got into bottles in about 1965 or ‘66 when I was in high school, and we started digging. My uncle was in Arizona, near some of the old mining camps there. Those were the glory days of bottle digging. People had access with four-wheel drive vehicles and gas was cheap and time-off was more abundant. Then years passed and people started really hitting the ghost towns and mining camps and logging camps of the West. Anyway, we started by digging some of the...