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Medicine Bottles: This section lists more than 200 bottles There are many more in the collection but these provide a broad overview of the genre.. Many of these bottles are quack items, some served in legitimate pharmacies.. In those situations they are cross referenced under pharmacy and may be seen in either location. Some of the pharmacy bottles may be seen only under pharmacy. The bottles that were quack items are clear from reading the descriptions and the claims.However in some cases, the uses overlapped with medically valuable treatments. Even many of the legitimate pharmacy items contained drugs that are no long considered to have any merit. Dating the bottles can be fairly accurate with a few guidelines, In some cases the reference contains an ad that yields a very reliable date. Bottles with pontilled bottoms that were hand blown date to the mid nineteenth century or earlier. When the claim is made that the product is a cure it dates prior to the pure food and drug acts of the turn of the nineteenth century. After the acts were passed the word cure was dropped and remedy was substituted. Even some of the legitimate pharmacy items would be considered to border on quackery today. Although this section is named medicine bottles for convenience, it also lists items that were sold in tins, pots and various shaped wooden containers. A review of this section will provide the reader with a broad overview of the wide variety of consumer medicines that have been available over the centuries.

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