MRS WINSLOW’S SOOTHING SYRUP.

“Rome wasn’t built in a day” of the many things this quote applies to, healthcare happens to be one of them. The present health care system is certainly not what it used to be centuries back.

“Mrs Winslow’s soothing syrup” while the name might not ring a bell to most of us now, it sure would be otherwise if we could ask those who lived in the United Kingdom, United States during the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Why? you might wonder, well that’s why you have Nurse Mentee. I’m here to help dear reader.

In the year 1849 Jeremiah Curtis and his partner Benjamin Perkins in Bangor, Maine made a product using a formula his mother-in-law, Mrs Charlotte N. Winslow, a paediatric nurse had created. This product was named “Mrs Winslow’s soothing syrup”. It was a patent medicine, that is this medicine could be purchased with or without a prescription. This medicine was sold for the purposes of; treating dysentery, relieving constipation, freshening breath, cleaning teeth, calming fussy children (which it was popularly known for). Mrs Winslow’s soothing syrup’s visual advertisements displayed happy smiling babies cradled by their beautiful mums and appeared on newspapers, recipe books, calendars and trade cards (similar to what is now known as a business card).

If Mrs Winslow’s soothing syrup did all that why then is it on this list obsolete remedies? Well, we are getting to it. The formula for this “soothing syrup ” consisted of morphine sulfate (65 mg per ounce of the syrup), sodium carbonate, spirits foeniculi, aqua ammonia. It was recommended that children less than a month old were given 6 to 10 drops of the syrup and those at the age 6 months were given at least a teaspoonful 3 to 4 times daily until results were observable. While it calmed a few babies, many babies who were given this went to sleep and never woke up, hence it earned its nickname “baby killer”. It was estimated that thousands of children died from overdose of this syrup or suffered from addiction and withdrawal symptoms.

According to a 1868 court summary over 1.5 million bottles of the medicine were sold annually. Also unlike it is nowadays, in the 1800s it did not matter if you put the active ingredients of your products on the label as this was the case for “Mrs Winslow’s soothing syrup”. The Pure food and Drug Act instituted in the United States in 1906 forced companies to disclose active ingredients in the drug packaging, this led to the removal of morphine from the medicine and “soothing” from its name and eventually it’s denouncement in 1911 however it continued to be sold until it was removed from the market in the 1930s.

Mrs Winslow’s soothing syrup is another example of a broader trend in medical history, where well-intentioned remedies were based on flawed assumptions in an attempt to understand and heal the human body. Learning about this series of obsolete remedies shine the light bright on how far we’ve come trying to provide safe and effective treatments that makes up medical science today.

Thank you for reading .