Topic: Glass medicine bottles ?

[Gilead]

HI
   i am looking for any information i can get on the two Gren medicine bottles i bought from a flea market the other day one as LIQ ARSENIC the other TP.
NUX VOM. wrote on them in capital letters so i am not shouting  on the base of each bottle is 12 and twi arrows one facing one way one the other.

Any info is appreciated what year? are they collectable etc.



                                                           thankyou.

[Anne]

Hi Steve, long time no see!  The green colour tells us these are poison bottles, as does the ribbing (an indicator for blind/partially sighted people). There's a definite collectorship of poison bottles, have a look at this article: http://www.collectorsweekly.com/bottles/poison-bottles and the Collecting Poison Bottles website here: http://www.his-church.net/poison/poison.htm

Tr Nux Vom means Tincture of Nux Vomica = Strychnos, a nut which makes you vomit, and which contains a small amount of strychnine, which like arsenic is poisonous.

[keith]

The bottles look new from the picture.I'm not sure their contents would still be used,liquid arsenic(nasty) the other is a strychnine based vomit inducing tinture(don't fancy that either)Chemist bottles are quite collectable,I'm sure there are web sites dealing with bottles,Keith.

[keith]

Beat me to it,must try harder,Keith.

[malwodyn]

Looks to me as if both bottles came from a dispenser's shelf - the contents are marked on the side of the bottle, rather as you would have the title on the spine of the book.  They may look modern, but the stoppers look to be well made - rather better than many mass produced stoppers today.

[Gilead]

Hi Anne.
           Yes been very busy over the last 18 months or so moved house and have been bust doing up the new place. also if you remember i decided to collect Whitefriars glass so i pass most glass while i am out now, except items that look different or out of the ordinary. Thank you for the info i had no idea about the bottle except of cause they were used for poison,


 They look new but as malwodyn ( Hello by the way) says the stoppers look well made i think these are a bot older the recent ones ?

And I Keith these were covered in all sorts of gunk when i found them i soaked them in luke warm water over nice with baby oil in to release the stoppers. so they may not be new. thank you all for a quick response.
                                                                                                                             Steve.

[malwodyn]

Having had a good look at the photos (particularly those of the bases and the stoppers) I'm inclined to say that they were made between the wars.  The stoppers look to be of very high quality, and even if the bottles were machine made, some care was taken in their finishing. 

I think they were part of a large set made for a dispensing chemist - or possibly a doctor who made up his own prescriptions - some time in the thirties.  The lettering points to their being 20th century, and shortly after the war we had the NHS, and very few doctors were dispensing their own prescriptions; also fewer pharmacists were actually making the prescriptions up on their own premises (though a pharmacist friend told me she was taught at pharmacy school how to make pills - and that was barely twenty years ago)