Important: Safety Warning
This page recommends preparations containing opium, laudanum, morphine, or similar narcotics — in some cases for children. These substances are dangerously addictive, easily fatal in overdose, and strictly controlled by law today.
This page presents medical treatment from an era before modern medicine. The remedies described are ineffective against the conditions named, and some of the ingredients or doses are harmful. Do not use them to treat any illness; consult a qualified medical professional.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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Cough Mixture
Mrs. C. Patterson.
Two ounces of gum arabic, one ounce of paregoric elixir, two ounces of sugar candy, juice of one lemon; mix with six glasses of hot water. One wineglass to be taken morning, noon, and night.
This is a household drug preparation rather than a food, and its active ingredient is an opiate. The notes below explain the archaic terms and why the mixture is not something to compound at home.
- Paregoric elixir is opiumParegoric is camphorated tincture of opium, an alcoholic preparation containing morphine along with camphor, anise and benzoic acid. One ounce of it in this bottle is a meaningful narcotic dose, and it is dispensed in the United States today only as a controlled prescription drug.
- The dosing has no floorThe instruction is one wineglass three times a day, with no distinction by age or weight. A Victorian wineglass held roughly two fluid ounces, so each dose carries some fraction of the ounce of paregoric in the bottle, and how large a fraction depends entirely on how much water was used. Opiates suppress the cough reflex and respiration together, which is precisely the danger in a child or an elderly patient.
- Suppressing a cough is not treating itA cough in the 1870s might be bronchitis, whooping cough, tuberculosis or pneumonia. A preparation that quiets the cough while leaving the cause untouched was actively harmful in exactly the cases that most needed attention. Anything resembling this should be handled by a physician, not a kitchen.
- Gum arabicThe dried sap of acacia, sold in tears or powder and dissolved in hot water to make a thick, bland demulcent syrup. It is still a legal food additive and does nothing but coat the throat; it is the harmless part of the formula.
- Sugar candyNot confectionery in the modern sense but hard rock sugar, crystallised from boiled syrup and sold in lumps for exactly this kind of use. Two ounces here is sweetener and thickener.
- "Six glasses of hot water" is unmeasuredThe original gives no glass size, so the strength of the finished mixture is genuinely indeterminate; six glasses could mean anything from something over a pint to three pints of water for the same fixed dose of opium. The strength of each wineglass dose therefore cannot be known.
- If you want the recipe's harmless halfGum arabic, sugar and lemon juice in hot water is a plain demulcent syrup and appears in many old books without the paregoric. For an actual cough, use a current over-the-counter product or see a clinician.
The Home Cook Book (Chicago, first published 1874) was a subscription cookbook compiled from recipes contributed by named local women — Mrs. C. Patterson here — and like many American household books of its generation it carried a section of family medicines alongside the puddings and pickles. Paregoric was then a fixture of the domestic shelf, bought by the ounce from any druggist without prescription and given for coughs, colic, diarrhoea and teething; it is the ancestor of the notorious infant soothing syrups of the same decades. Opium preparations were not restricted at the federal level in the United States until the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 required them to be declared on the label, and the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914 brought them under federal control, though a number of states had regulated their sale earlier. The gum arabic and rock sugar around the paregoric reflect an older pharmacy in which the sweet, mucilaginous vehicle was considered as much part of the cure as the drug — a linctus, meant to be sipped slowly so it coated the throat.