10 Victorian Medicines That Were Actually Poison

Victorian doctors had a medicine for almost every ordinary complaint: diarrhoea, fever, weakness, pain, sleeplessness, and coughs. Some of those remedies were lead, antimony, mercury, strychnine, arsenic, cocaine, and heroin in respectable bottles and carefully measured doses. This countdown follows ten medicines from number ten to number one, explaining what each substance was supposed to do and what it could do instead. The story moves from sugar of lead and tartar emetic to calomel, mercury treatments, chloroform, and the habit-forming drugs that followed. The answer is not simply that Victorian doctors were careless. These remedies worked visibly, quickly, or powerfully enough to feel convincing. That was exactly what made their dangers so easy to carry home.