Antique 1910s Formalin Pharmacy Label AKA Formaldehyde to cure your throat? ✨

Size: 2.5 x 1.5 inches ~ Unused label stock, never applied to a bottle. They vary a little one to the next.

🧪 What It Says

A small cream card, rounded corners, everything printed in maroon ink. FORMALIN / THROAT & VOICE / TABLETS. across the top, then the formula in a chemist's Latin shorthand: Formalin (dry) gr. 1/8, Sacchar. Lact. grs. 2, Ol. Menth. Pip., Acid. Citric., Sacchar. Alb., the last three bracketed a.a. q.s. Underneath, the sales pitch: "A skilful combination possessing antiseptic properties invaluable as a substitute for gargles and mouth washes in affections of the throat and mouth." Then the dose: "ONE TO BE ALLOWED TO DISSOLVE SLOWLY IN THE MOUTH OCCASIONALLY." And at the foot, in its own ruled panel: C. CHARNLEY, Dispensing Chemist, WILMSLOW. The reverse is blank stock - these never made it onto a bottle.

💊 A Chemist's Own Recipe

Translated out of the Latin, that's dry formalin, milk sugar, oil of peppermint, citric acid and white sugar, combined in equal parts, quantity sufficient to make a tablet. Formalin was Schering's trade name for its formaldehyde solution - a real antiseptic, by the standards of the day, meant to dissolve slowly against the throat rather than be swallowed. The formula lines up closely with Formamint, the throat tablet Genatosan launched across Britain in 1907 and which the country was buying by the million within a few years - same core of formaldehyde, milk sugar and citric acid. This looks like a Wilmslow chemist's own house version of a tablet everyone in Britain already knew.

🏪 C. Charnley, Dispensing Chemist

Charles Charnley really was in business on Grove Street, Wilmslow - he's in Kelly's Directory of Chemists and Druggists in 1885, still there in the 1921 edition, and by 1904 the shop was trading as "The Grove Pharmacy." A sibling label from the same pharmacy, for an asthma powder, gives the founding date as 1864. The business outlasted him: by 1952 it was "Charnley Ltd., The Grove Pharmacy, Wilmslow," still trading as a limited company. His actual working recipe books survive today in the Wellcome Collection in London - two volumes running from 1866 to 1940, one a register of prescriptions made up for named Wilmslow customers, the other full of medical, household, cosmetic and veterinary recipes clipped and written in by hand. This little label came out of exactly that kind of shop - a chemist who compounded his own remedies and printed his own labels for them.

🏘️ Wilmslow, Cheshire

Wilmslow sits about eleven miles south of Manchester, its name straight out of Old English - Wighelmes hlaw, "the mound of a man called Wighelm." Before the railway arrived in 1842 it was little more than a few farms and a church; the town that grew up around Grove Street and Bank Square afterward is the one Charnley set up shop in. The peat bog at nearby Lindow Moss gave up Lindow Man, an Iron Age body preserved close to 2,000 years, now on display in London. Alan Turing later lived in Wilmslow too, from 1948 until his death there in 1954.

✨ Hard to Find

A Formalin Throat & Voice label from a small-town chemist is a hard one to find.