In fact, the Monyon pharmaceutical firm provides separate cures for more than a dozen illnesses. Most cost 17 cents each.
There’s Monyon’s Kidney Cure, Measles Cure, Worm Cure and Pleurisy Cure. However, Monyon’s Gonorrhea Cure cost a whopping 70 cents.
The medications and costs for several thousand items can be found in a 59- page catalogue of one of Philadelphia largest Drug Stores. It’s the 1901 catalogue of the C.G.A. Loder’s Drug Store at 15th and Chestnut streets.
It seems that Loder’s was the CVS or Walgreens of its day. It carried everything in medications, filled doctor’s prescriptions and it made many products under its own label.
It’s a fun read and educational. You’ll go running to the dictionary to find words such as Lithia (mineral water), Cascara Sagrada (dried bark for constipation) Pastilles (a sweet throat lozenge), and Phthisis (wasting away from tuberculosis).
Loder’s did sell a few non-medical items: stationery, perfumes, dental floss, insecticide and bird food. Hire’s Root Beer was on sale but it was sold for medicinal purposes.
Loder’s sold a vast number of tonics. It’s not spelled out, but many tonics were loaded with alcohol – an acceptable way of boozing, especially for housewives.
The most popular tonic “for female complaints” was Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound, which cost a whopping 71 cents. But 20.6 percent of each bottle was pure alcohol.
The entire back cover of the catalogue advertises Loder’s Serilized Malt Extract. It was good for more than a dozen problems: coughs, colds, nursing mothers, indigestion, sleeplessness etc. The ad said it “retained all the properties of malt and hops in a highly concentrated state.” Sounds like beer.
We wish you could still buy “Skookun Root Hair Grower.”
Loder’s Wine of Cocoa at 50 cents a pint could get you arrested today. The 1901 description says “cocoa is “probably the most valuable medical discovery of the age.”
In other words, this great “discovery” is cocaine. It was sold in a mixture of “good, sound, imported wine.”