It's amusing that you believe the lack of regulation of medicines in the 18th and 19th centuries was a wonderful thing. In fact, most of the "medicine" sold back then worked - as much as it did - because of either the placebo effect or the fact that a lot of illnesses are self-limiting: the body either marshals it's powers of recovery and you get better, or you die.
But some medicine definitely had an effect. You could buy opium and later morphine over the counter with no questions asked, so there was that. You could also get medications containing arsenic and strychnine, although you just had to hope that the people making up the formulation in a shed somewhere were on the ball when following their recipe. No class-action lawsuits back in those good old days, and if a patent-medicine got the reputation of killing a lot of people, they just changed the label.
And then there was the very widely used and innocuous-sounding calomel. Amongst many other ailments, this was used to treat melancholy (depression), constipation, syphilis, influenza, parasites and teething pain in babies. These days, calomel is known by its chemical name: mercurous chloride. Just in case your knowledge of chemical nomenclature is a little rusty, that means it's a salt of mercury. While pure mercury metal pretty much just passes straight through the digestive system and makes some interesting looking shit, mercury salts are absorbed by the body.
One of the immediate effects of taking calomel was an explosive emptying of the bowels (which, like losing some blood, doctors thought was a good thing back then). If a patient continued to take it, they first began to drool copiously (as in pints of saliva), and then they started suffering all the weird, nasty symptoms of heavy metal poisoning.
Unfortunately, the communistic, nosey, tax-money-wasting FDA does its best to stop people from selling these wonderful drugs as cure-alls these days.
What made America great
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It's amusing that you believe the lack of regulation of medicines in the 18th and 19th centuries was a wonderful thing. In fact, most of the "medicine" sold back then worked - as much as it did - because of either the placebo effect or the fact that a lot of illnesses are self-limiting: the body either marshals it's powers of recovery and you get better, or you die.
But some medicine definitely had an effect. You could buy opium and later morphine over the counter with no questions asked, so there was that. You could also get medications containing arsenic and strychnine, although you just had to hope that the people making up the formulation in a shed somewhere were on the ball when following their recipe. No class-action lawsuits back in those good old days, and if a patent-medicine got the reputation of killing a lot of people, they just changed the label.
And then there was the very widely used and innocuous-sounding calomel. Amongst many other ailments, this was used to treat melancholy (depression), constipation, syphilis, influenza, parasites and teething pain in babies. These days, calomel is known by its chemical name: mercurous chloride. Just in case your knowledge of chemical nomenclature is a little rusty, that means it's a salt of mercury. While pure mercury metal pretty much just passes straight through the digestive system and makes some interesting looking shit, mercury salts are absorbed by the body.
One of the immediate effects of taking calomel was an explosive emptying of the bowels (which, like losing some blood, doctors thought was a good thing back then). If a patient continued to take it, they first began to drool copiously (as in pints of saliva), and then they started suffering all the weird, nasty symptoms of heavy metal poisoning.
Unfortunately, the communistic, nosey, tax-money-wasting FDA does its best to stop people from selling these wonderful drugs as cure-alls these days.