Antique 1910s-1930s Poison Label Set ☠️ Carbolic, Nitric, Sulphuric, Oxalic Acid and Arsenate of Lead, Druggist Antidote Labels

☠️ What Did a Poison Label Tell You to Do When the Doctor Was Far Away? Five Antique Druggist Labels With the Antidote Printed Right On Them

Size: Carbolic 2 1/2" x 2 1/2", Nitric 2 1/2" x 2 1/2", Sulphuric 2 1/2" x 2 1/2", Oxalic 2 1/2" x 2 1/2", Arsenate of Lead 2 1/2" x 1 1/2" ~ All five never used, little to no wear.

This is the dangerous end of the old drug store shelf. Five real poison labels from three small-town stores, each with a skull and crossbones, the name of what was in the bottle, and then, in tiny type, what to do if it got on you or in you. A druggist, the old word for a pharmacist, pasted a label like this on each bottle of poison he sold, with his own store's name at the foot. These never made it onto a bottle. You get one of each, drawn from my stack, so the ones pictured show you the kind you'll get.

I love that these stores printed the antidote, meaning the fix for the poison, right on the label, because back then the label might be the only help in the house.

🔍 Read Them Side by Side

Put the five in a row and they start talking to each other. Chalk turns up on three of them. Raw egg white is on four. Mustard in warm water is on three, and that one is called an emetic, which just means something to make you throw up. And all five end the same way: Call Physician. The Nebraska label says Call Physician at Once. On the others it comes last, almost as an afterthought, after the whiskey and the egg white and the mustard. That last line tells you a lot about how far away the doctor could be.

💀 Carbolic Acid: The Germ Killer That Burned

Carbolic acid was the everyday name for phenol, the stuff Joseph Lister used to make antiseptic surgery possible, which means surgery with the germs held down. For decades every drug store sold it over the counter as a disinfectant, a liquid for killing germs. It could also burn skin on contact and was a common cause of poisonings. So the label told you, word for word: "External—Flood with water and bathe with dilute alcohol or whiskey, or a bland oil (olive, cottonseed, linseed)." External meant on the skin. Internal meant swallowed, and for that the label called for milk, raw egg white, mucilage (a thick, gluey liquid), gruel (thin boiled cereal) or cornstarch paste to coat the stomach, then the mustard to bring it all back up. Read it the way a scared person in 1910 would have.

🧪 Nitric Acid: Drink Chalk and Wall Plaster

Here's the one that'll make you read it twice. Nitric acid was a powerful acid, and if someone swallowed it, the label said to "Drink a teaspoonful or more of magnesia, chalk, whiting or wall plaster," or small pieces of soap softened with water, all taken in milk, mucilage or raw egg white. Yes, wall plaster. It sounds crazy now, but there was a method to it. Magnesia (a white powder), chalk, whiting (which is just powdered chalk), baking soda and old lime plaster were all alkaline, the opposite of an acid, and the thinking was to knock the acid down fast with whatever was in the house.

⚗️ Sulphuric Acid: Oil of Vitriol

Spelled the old way with a "ph." Medieval alchemists called this one oil of vitriol, because they made it by roasting green vitriol, an iron compound, in an iron vessel. In 1746 John Roebuck worked out how to make it in big lead-lined chambers, and that way of making it ran the business for nearly two centuries. By the time this label was printed, sulphuric acid was everywhere, in fertilizer, in metal work and in the batteries of the new automobiles, and a small-town drug store sold it by the bottle. The directions run nearly word for word with the nitric label, wall plaster and all.

🧽 Oxalic Acid: The Household Cleaner

This one was a household cleaner and bleach in those days, good for rust stains and wood, and a real poison if swallowed. The label's advice is the shortest of the bunch. On the skin: "Wash with water." Swallowed: magnesia, chalk or whiting stirred into plenty of water, then the mustard. The idea was for the magnesia and chalk to bind the acid up, and the mustard to bring it back.

🍎 Arsenate of Lead: The Bug Killer

The odd one out, because it wasn't medicine or a cleaner. Arsenate of lead was bug killer, the standard spray for apple orchards and gardens. It was first used against the gypsy moth in Massachusetts in 1898 and went on mainly to apples, other fruit trees and garden crops, to fight pests like the codling moth, an apple pest. Before it, farmers fought bugs with Paris green, a bright green arsenic compound. Druggists packed arsenate up for local customers, which is why this label has a blank spot marked Net Contents for the druggist to write in how much you bought. The same printed form turns up with other druggists' names on it, so it was a stock label a store ordered with its own name at the foot. DDT started replacing it after 1947, and the EPA banned it on food crops in 1988.

💊 Graham & Wortham's, Corvallis, Oregon, Phone 48

Three of the five come from this one store, and these two were real Corvallis fixtures. There was a Graham behind a Corvallis drug counter by 1872. In 1879 Thomas Graham, druggist, was in business as Graham, Hamilton & Co., "dealers in medicines, chemicals, dye stuffs, oils, glass and putty," with wines and liquors "for medicinal use," lamps and wall paper besides, and he was the Benton County treasurer in 1879 and 1880. Henry Wortham came up from Mississippi. He was in Corvallis by 1879, when he ran for city marshal and got all of 23 votes, so it's a good thing he stuck to pharmacy.

By the fall of 1892 the store was Graham & Wortham. That December a boot and shoe shop opened next door, and in 1906 their counter was where you got your season tickets for the Corvallis Lyceum Course, a series of lectures and shows. My favorite story: in February 1919 a "smooth stranger" passed a worthless check and got the store for $10, even though the police had warned the town's drug stores to watch for him just days before. When Henry Wortham died in March 1921, at 64, the Portland paper said he'd been in the drug business in Corvallis for 35 years. He never married. The store name was still on a list of Corvallis businesses in 1925. That little PHONE 48 is a two-digit number from the days when you picked up the receiver, the operator said "number please," and you just asked for 48.

Corvallis sits where the Marys River meets the Willamette, and its name is Latin for "heart of the valley." It was briefly the capital of Oregon Territory in 1855, and it's the home of Oregon Agricultural College, now Oregon State University.

🏙️ Lents Pharmacy, Portland, and a Mayor in the Family

The oxalic label carries the store's own LP monogram in a riveted ring and "Lents Pharmacy" in a flowing script. Lents was platted, meaning laid out in lots, as the Town of Lent in 1892 by Oliver P. Lent, an Ohio-born pioneer. By 1912 it had nearly 10,000 people, and Portland annexed it. The pharmacy stood on the northwest corner of Foster and 92nd, and the 9201 Foster Road address fits the block numbers Portland adopted in its Great Renumbering of 1931. Frank Peterson ran the Lents pharmacy for a number of years. His son Fred, born in 1896, became a pharmacist too, then a city commissioner in 1941, then Portland's 43rd mayor from 1953 through 1956.

🌾 Glen's Drug Store, Auburn, Nebraska

Carl M. Glen was born in Tecumseh, Nebraska, on July 28, 1895, and studied pharmacy at Babcock College of Pharmacy in Des Moines. He served in the Army in World War I, with a machine gun battalion and a field hospital, became J. C. Thygeson's partner in an Auburn drugstore in 1922, and in 1934 went out on his own as owner and manager of the Glen Drug Co. That's the store on this label, so it was printed in 1934 or later. He chaired the committee that built the town's $25,000 swimming pool in 1931, served on the school board while the new Auburn High School went up in 1937, and listed his hobby as hunting. Auburn itself came out of an 1882 merger, when neighboring Sheridan and Calvert joined up as one town.

🗓️ How Old Are They?

The three Corvallis labels are from the 1910s, inside the years the store traded under both names, from 1892 into the mid-1920s. Oxalic and Arsenate of Lead are from the 1930s. So it's a set that runs 1910s to 1930s, all of it antique.

🖼️ Where They Go

Frame them for a pharmacy, a chemistry classroom or a mad scientist's lab. They'd suit a nurse, a pharmacist, an Oregon State fan or anybody from Corvallis, Southeast Portland or Nemaha County, and they look sharp beside an old apothecary bottle, apothecary being the old word for a drug store. These are paper history, made to read and to hang, and that's the only job they have left. There is no new press run coming. When the last of these are hanging in collections and galleries, they will be very hard to track down for sale.