Antique Blood Mixture Label 🧪 C. Charnley Ltd Grove Pharmacy Wilmslow Cheshire 1920s

Size: 3 x 1.5 inches ~ Little to no wear, never applied. They vary a little one to the next.

A Wilmslow Chemist's Blood Mixture, Formula Printed on the Label 🧪

Many patent medicines of the day kept their contents secret. This label prints its formula to the hundredth of a percent. The Grove Quality Blood Mixture from C. Charnley Ltd of Wilmslow, Cheshire, lists iron sulphate, magnesium sulphate, dilute sulphuric acid and a decoction of sarsaparilla right under its promise to cure a customer's complexion. And in the Wellcome Collection in London sit two manuscript volumes catalogued as the papers of "Charles Charnley of Wilmslow, Cheshire, Chemist," one of them opening with a register of prescriptions dispensed to named individuals. This is an unused 1920s label from the Charnley pharmacy, never put on a bottle.

🏷️ Every Line on the Label

• The Grove QUALITY, in white script and capitals on a dark brown band
• BLOOD MIXTURE
• An excellent remedy for Impure Blood, Pimples and Skin Eruptions.
• DOSE: ONE TABLESPOONFUL IN WATER AFTER MEALS THREE TIMES A DAY.
• Ferri Sulph. 1·04%; Magnes. Sulph. 6·25%; Acid Sulph. Dil. 2·08%; Dec. Sarsæ ad 100%.
• Prepared only by
• C. Charnley Ltd, in white script on a dark brown band
• Chemists / THE GROVE PHARMACY / WILMSLOW / PHONE 3059

The center panel is pale blue, the bands dark brown and the border cream, framed with dashed rules and rounded corners. The back is blank, but the type was pressed in hard enough that every line reads through the paper in reverse.

🧪 Reading the Formula

The Latin is dispensary shorthand. Ferri Sulph. is iron sulphate, known for centuries as green vitriol or copperas, and still used today to treat or prevent iron deficiency. Magnes. Sulph. is magnesium sulphate, Epsom salt, named for a bitter saline spring at Epsom in Surrey and used as a laxative. Acid Sulph. Dil. is dilute sulphuric acid. Dec. Sarsæ is a decoction of sarsaparilla, and "ad 100%" means the sarsaparilla decoction made up the rest of the mixture. Put together, the bottle held iron, a laxative salt and a little acid in a sarsaparilla base.

🌿 Bad Blood, Bad Skin: An Old Tradition in One Sentence

The label's promise carries a whole tradition of popular medicine in a single line: the belief that spots and rashes came from bad blood, and that the blood could be cleansed. Sarsaparilla belonged to the same tradition. In nineteenth-century America it was sold as a patent medicine, its advertisements promising help for skin and blood problems. In England the blood mixture had its own famous name: Clarke's Blood Mixture, created by Francis J. Clarke, a Lincoln chemist who served three terms as mayor of Lincoln between 1878 and 1885.

Secret formulas eventually drew a public reckoning. In 1909 the British Medical Association published Secret Remedies, analyzing what popular proprietary medicines cost and what they actually contained; it sold more than 60,000 copies within two years, and More Secret Remedies followed in 1912. Against that background, a local chemist's label with its percentages printed on the front stands out.

📚 Charles Charnley in the Wellcome Collection

The Wellcome Collection in London holds two volumes catalogued together as MSS.8437–8438, "Charles Charnley of Wilmslow, Cheshire, Chemist." MS.8437, a clothbound volume of 242 pages, opens with a register of prescriptions dispensed to named individuals on pages 2 to 40, followed by handwritten and printed recipes for medical, household, cosmetic and veterinary preparations that run even onto the covers and flyleaves. MS.8438, a worn leatherbound book of 192 folios, is inscribed "Charles Charnley, 16 May 1866" and gathers medical, household, cosmetic, culinary, veterinary and horticultural recipes in several hands, with periodical cuttings and inserted notes. They are the working papers of a chemist with the same name and the same town as the firm printed on this label.

🏘️ Wilmslow, Cheshire

Wilmslow lies 11 miles south of Manchester, with the River Bollin flowing through The Carrs park. The name comes from Old English: the mound of a man called Wīghelm. Before the railway came in 1842 the place was only a few farms and a church. The line changed that, and wealthy North West merchants relocated there, turning it into a Victorian town. Bank Square and Grove Street are the center of its shopping today, and at the 2021 census the parish had 26,213 people. In 1984 nearby Lindow Moss gave up Lindow Man, a preserved Iron Age body counted among the most important Iron Age finds in the country.