Medicine & Anatomy
Hingston & Company | Trade card of Hingston & Company, Chemists and Druggists
£135.00
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An attractive trade card for the chemists Hingston & Company of Cheltenham, “opposite the Plough Hotel. Prescriptions accurately prepared with drugs and Chemicals from Apothecaries Hall”. The text is elaborately engraved and the card features a well-executed bust of Hippocrates and staff of Asclepius. The Science Museum in London has a copy of the same trade card, and the National Archives hold the company’s day book and bankruptcy papers from 1837-1839.
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Cheltenhem, c. 1837. Trade card (90 x 61 mm). Elaborate copperplate engraved text and illustrations of a bust Hippocrates and staff of Asclepius. A few tiny, light spots, adhesive marks to verso.
Michael Birk | [Art Nouveau chromolithographic pharmacy catalogue] Katalog No. 4.
£350.00
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A superb, unused Art Nouveau chromolithographic catalogue issued by the German pharmaceutical and medical supply firm Michael Birk, probably in the 1890s.
This remarkable, 320 page catalogue catalogue contains 15 double-sided plates of elaborate chromolithographic, metallic, and embossed designs for product labels, as well as another 290 pages advertising an incredible array of other products. The chromolithographic labels could be ordered in bulk to be used on bottles and jars filled in person by the pharmacist, and some could be personalised with the shop’s name and address. The catalogue was evidently designed for international distribution, as the examples are shown in a variety of languages, including Arabic. Some of the products include lemon and orange syrup, ginger ale, Egyptian nerve tonic, quinine, toothpaste, cod liver oil, antiseptics, a wide variety of alcoholic beverages including wine, port, rum and rum punch, champagne, and gin, and cosmetics products such as eau de cologne, agua de florida and scented waters. Most of the labels are very elaborate, with colourful designs echoing the origins or contents of the products, some with an exotic or Orientalist flavour, and others using historical imagery. Some are plainer, giving only the product name or a number. Nine pages of labels incorporate fine metallic and die-cut and embossed cameo-like decoration - of note are the two pages of delicate perfume bottle labels.
The remainder of the catalogue details a variety of products, all depicted in large and well-executed engravings. They include bottles, pots, boxes, tubes and dispensers, including decorative bottles and perfume atomisers, and display units. For the use of the pharmacist are moulds, rollers, mortars and pestles, scales, laboratory glassware, bunsen burners, alembics, and ovens. And there are sections for medical dressings and devices, generators of therapeutic electricity, and all types of surgical and dental tools, including large items such as chairs, tables and boilers. A superb catalogue encompassing all of late-19th century pharmacy and medicine. -
Tuttlingen, Germany: Michael Birk, [c. 1890s].
Quarto. Original limp cloth wrappers blocked in gilt, grey, black, and white, blue endpapers, blue top-stain. 15 double-sided leaves of chromolithographic, metallic-printed, and embossed decoration, of which 6 are folding, engravings throughout the other 290 pages. Minor bumps at the corners. A superb, fresh copy in unused condition with many of the leaves unopened and still delicately adhering to each other at the edges.
The American Products Company | Zanol. The Better Way to Buy. Catalog No. 20
£450.00
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A beautiful, 78 page chromolithographic catalogue for the American Products Company’s Zanol line of cosmetics, food products, and home goods, including 16 pages in full colour. A superb example of Art Deco marketing design.
The American Products Company was founded in 1907 by three brothers, Albert, Edgar and Clarence Mihalovitch (Albert later changed his surname to Mills), of Cincinnati, who hoped to capture the growing Midwestern consumer market (see “Cosmetics by the American products Company”, Collecting Vintage Compacts blog, January 2012). This catalogue promotes “Shopping in Your Own Home the Zanol Way”, and explains that “the Zanol plan affords you the opportunity of buying the finest products possible to produce, direct from the maker, delivered right to your home, absolutely fresh, unconditionally guaranteed... The complete Zanol line comprises more than 350 products... all of them made from the choicest ingredients in our sanitary, daylight Pure Food Kitchens and Laboratories, under the direction of skilled chemists, chefs, and dieticians”.
Advertised here are a wide array of consumables, with a focus on powders and syrups that could be shipped easily and would appeal to an emerging middle class who were time and money-conscious. For the kitchen there are food flavourings and colours, and numerous instant mixes for soft drinks, jams and jellies, icing, cakes, pies, and puddings. Among them are Ezemade pumpkin pie filling (”it is now possible to serve delicious pumpkin pie throughout the year”); Flakykrust instant pie crust; Mapelade instant maple syrup (”now you can afford delicious maple syrup whenever you want it”); and even Ezemade ice cream powder (”just add to a quart of milk and freeze”). The broad selection of home goods include medications and hygiene products, house cleaning and repair supplies, hot water bottles, paints, insecticide, and even a set of salt and pepper shakers. Perhaps the most appealing section is the beauty line, comprising soaps and toothpaste (”don’t envy pretty teeth - have them”); face and body powders; a variety of lotions including almond, lemon and witch hazel, cucumber and benzoine, and “dermaline of roses” (”keep the alluring charms of radiant youth”); shampoos, pomade, and hair tonics; cosmetics including powder compacts and tubes of lipstick; and perfumes, primarily their three main lines, La Bara (named after the silent film “vamp” Theda Bara, best known for playing Cleopatra), Fleur d’Orient, and Dream Girl. There are also a number of gift sets packaging perfumes, soaps and cosmetics, including a shaving kit for men, sets for new mothers, and an attractive La Barra manicure kit.
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Edition A. Cincinnati, OH: The American Products Company, May, 1925.
Perfect bound (355 x 280 mm). Original brown wrappers printed in blue and cream, brown cloth backstrip. 78 pages, of which 16 are in full colour and the rest being uncoloured lithographs on single-colour backgrounds. With the original order form loosely inserted. Light rubbing at the extremities, small chips at the ends of the spine. A fresh copy in excellent condition.
Wickes & Co. | Trade card of Wickes & Co., Chemists and Druggists
£35.00
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An attractive trade card for the chemists Wickes & Co. of Cheltenham, in fine condition and featuring elaborate copperplate engraving including illustrations of an alembic and a mortar and pestle. Both the Science Museum of London and the Society of Apothecaries hold copies of this trade card.
- Cheltenham, c. 1825-1835. Trade card (98 x 65 mm). Elaborate copperplate engraved text in an architectural border with the British crest, an alembic, and a mortar and pestle. Fine condition.
[Woodhead, Joseph] | Catalogue or Guide to the Liverpool Museum of Anatomy.
£350.00
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The rare catalogue of the Liverpool Museum of Anatomy, describing in detail the Museum’s contents and policies, and illustrating its interior by an engraving on the lower cover.
The Liverpool Museum of Anatomy was one of a number of such museums in the UK and US that specialised in wax anatomical models and, unlike many of the museums of professional medical organisations, were open to the public. Though the stated goal was always education, particularly regarding reproduction and the dangers of sexual vice, these museums also traded on the shock or titillation value of their exhibits and some were targeted by the medical establishment as purveyors of vice and quackery.
The proprietor of the Liverpool Museum was the physician Joseph Thornton Woodhead, who describes himself as “having spent thirty years in the study and treatment of diseases affecting the mental and generative organs, nervous and dyspeptic debility, either constitutional or acquired, decline of physical vigor, loss of mental energy, and the numerous concomitants to sexual disorganisation” and writes that those afflicted can consult him “personally at his establishment daily from 11am till 9pm, Sundays excepted”, while those living outside town could write (p. 63).
The Liverpool Museum offered a wide variety of exhibits on the human body, including most of the internal organs; the skeleton; digestion (”articles of human food, and what they are converted into”); common surgical procedures such as the removal of kidney stones; and the usual exhibits on STDs, obstetrics (including a caesarian section model and anatomical venuses), masturbation, circumcision, hermaphrodites, and “freaks of nature”. The admittance of women into such museums was controversial, but defended by many proprietors as an important educational opportunity for women who cared for their families’ health. This booklet advertises the Museum’s hours of admission for ladies as being Tuesdays and Fridays from 2-5pm, and also offers a course of six lectures on midwifery (p. 26). One of the exhibits aimed specifically at women was on the “dreadful effects of tight lacing”, being “a magnificant full-length figure in wax, the model of a young lady... who having from her earliest childhood accustomed herself to the pernicious habit of tight lacing, suddenly dropped down dead in the arms of her partner while dancing” (p. 52).
The Museum’s timeline is difficult to determine from historical sources (and it seems to have moved between Liverpool and Manchester several times), but in this booklet Woodhead claims that it had already been open for forty years. It appears to have been tolerated by the medical establishment until 1874, when Woodhead was prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act. “To Woodhead's justification ‘that the Royal College of Surgeons possesses, and admits the public to, an exhibition similar to his own”’, the magistrate replied that ‘he could understand museums of the character of the defendant's being connected with the hospitals and medical colleges, but when they came into the hands of private individuals they were likely to produce serious evils’ (Bates, “Indecent and Demoralising Representations: Public Anatomy Museums in mid-Victorian England”, Medical History vol. 52, January 2008). The Museum was closed and the exhibits sold to Louis Tussaud’s waxworks show.
This catalogue is rare. A search on WorldCat locates only four copies, at the Wellcome Library, Harvard, the University of Rochester, and the Getty Research Institute.
Bibliography: Hoolihan, An Annotated Catalogue of the Edward C. Atwater Collection of American Popular Medicine & Health Reform S-741.1
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...29, Paradise Street. This superb collection with all the latest additions, comprising upwards of 1000 models and diagrams, procured at the anatomical galleries of Paris, Florence, and Munich. Now forms the largest collection of anatomical preparations in England, with one exception only, namely of the Royal College of Surgeons’ Museum...
Liverpool: Matthews Brothers, Printers, [c. 1870s].
64 page pamphlet. Original light blue wrappers printed in black. Engraving depicting the museum on the lower wrapper, 1 engraving within the text. Wrappers rubbed, dulled, and spotted, minor crease to the upper corner slightly affecting the contents. Very good condition.