Vintage 1940s-1950s Cocillana Morphine Cough Syrup Label 💊 Morwessel Drugs Covington KY

Morphine in a Cough Syrup? 💊 Vintage 1940s-1950s Cocillana Cough Syrup Label, Morwessel Drugs, Covington KY

Size: 2 1/2" x 2"

💊 Your corner druggist once put a morphine derivative in a cough bottle, printed the word on the label, and had a boy run it to your door. This is that label — an original, unused Syrup Cocillana Comp. dispensing label from Morwessel Drugs of Covington, Kentucky, listing ethyl morphine hydrochloride in the same plain type as the dosing instructions.

🧾 Details

Approx. 2 1/2" x 2" ~
Original pharmacy dispensing label, black letterpress on cream stock, blank on the reverse
New old stock — never applied to a bottle
The label carries the store name, a named telephone exchange, the words DELIVERY SERVICE, and the corner the shop stood on in Covington, Kentucky

🔤 What it says, word for word

SYRUP COCILLANA COMP. — Each Fluid Ounce Contains: Ethyl Morphinehydrochloride (Morphine Deriv.) ¼ Gr. Warning: May be habit forming. Alcohol 6%. Tincture Euphorbia Pilulifera, Syrup Wild Lettuce, Tincture Cocillana, Syrup Squill Comp., Cascarin (Bitterless) and Menthol. DOSE—Adults, 1 teaspoonful repeated as directed by physician. Important—Persistent coughs may indicate the presence of a serious condition. Do not use this preparation when the cough has persisted for 10 days without securing competent advice. DISTRIBUTED BY ___ NET CONTENTS ___ FL. OZS. Beneath a rule: MORWESSEL Drugs, HEMLOCK 3631, DELIVERY SERVICE, 6TH AND RUSSELL, COVINGTON, KY.

📅 The label dates itself twice

Two lines on this sheet do the dating, and neither is a year.

“Warning: May be habit forming.” That exact phrase is not a druggist’s turn of speech — it is statutory. The Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938 required the label of any drug containing a listed habit-forming substance to carry the words “Warning—May be habit forming.” Its presence here puts the printing at 1938 or later, full stop.

HEMLOCK 3631. A named telephone exchange with a four-figure number belongs to the era before all-number calling, and Covington did not get rotary dial service until around 1951. Between the federal warning below and the telephone above, the window closes on the 1940s.

The blank NET CONTENTS ___ FL. OZS. fits the same period: the 1938 Act made the net quantity declaration compulsory, and a dispensing label left the figure open for the pharmacist to fill by hand.

🌿 What was actually in the bottle

Cocillana is the dried bark of Guarea rusbyi, a tree of Bolivia and the eastern Andes also called guapi or huapi bark. It reached Western medicine in the 1880s through the botanist Henry H. Rusby, collecting medicinal plants on an Amazon expedition; he suspected an alkaloid in it, and to this day the active principle has never been pinned down. It worked as a powerful expectorant — similar in action to ipecac but more stimulating to the bronchial passages.

Around it, a genuinely sophisticated botanical stack for its day: euphorbia pilulifera, a traditional bronchial herb; wild lettuce, a mild sedative with a long folk-medicine history; syrup of squill, a European expectorant drawn from the sea-onion bulb; cascarin in its bitterless form; and menthol for the cold sensation that tells a coughing patient something is happening.

Then the part modern eyes stop on. Ethyl morphine hydrochloride — known in older pharmacy as dionine or codethyline — is a semi-synthetic opioid first made by Merck in 1884, weaker than morphine itself and used chiefly to suppress the cough reflex. A quarter grain to the fluid ounce, with six per cent alcohol carrying it. It is still an approved antitussive in parts of Europe, and cocillana syrups are still where it most often lives.

🏥 Morwessel Drugs, and three generations on one corner

Henry Morwessel opened the pharmacy in 1881, in a Covington that was a dense German-Catholic river city facing Cincinnati across the Ohio — parish life, riverfront commerce, and a working-class street grid where the druggist on the corner was a fixture. The business stayed in the family for three generations in a substantial brick building with a striped awning and the Morwessel Drugs sign hung out at the corner.

The third generation was Donald C. Morwessel, a graduate of St. Xavier High School and the Cincinnati College of Pharmacy. He served as president of the Northern Kentucky Pharmacists Association, president of FONDA (Friends of Notre Dame Academy), and president of the Panorama Apartments for Senior Citizens, and in 1961 his own profession gave him the A. H. Robbins Award for Community Service in Pharmacy. He died on 10 March 2012, aged 83.

The two words on the bottom of this label — DELIVERY SERVICE — are the whole business model in miniature. You rang the store by its exchange name, said what you needed, and it arrived. The same corner, the same family, for generations.

⚖️ The regulatory arc this label sits in

The Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914 first brought opiates under federal accounting. The 1938 Act added the labeling duty — the warning printed here — and required adequate directions and honest declarations. The cough-duration caution on this sheet, telling the patient not to keep dosing past ten days without competent advice, is that same period’s idea of responsibility printed in the same size as everything else. Ethylmorphine preparations were steadily squeezed out as narcotic control tightened. Everything this label represents — a neighborhood druggist compounding and dispensing an opioid syrup under his own shop name — was legal, ordinary, and on its way out.

❓ Questions People Ask

How is it dated? By the required 1938 warning wording, which puts it at 1938 or later, and by the named telephone exchange, which belongs to the years before Covington went to dial service around 1951.

Does the 1881 make it an 1881 label? No — 1881 is the year the pharmacy was founded. Founding years are not printing dates.

Is it a reproduction? No. Original unused stock, letterpress-printed on period cream label paper, never applied to a bottle.

Is there anything in it now? No. It is a paper label only, sold for display and study.

🏡 Good for pharmacy and medical-history collections, Covington and Northern Kentucky local history, apothecary shadow boxes and framed displays, typography and letterpress collections, and teaching collections in pharmacy, pharmacology and public health.