NAM.2001-07-127-3

Medicine bottle, ‘Livingstone Rouser’, Burroughs, Wellcome and Company, 1896. Glass bottle with cork stopper and paper label with printed title, ‘Livingstone Rouser’, the trade mark brand, ‘Tabloid’, the manufacturer’s name, ‘Burroughs, Wellcome & Co’, and dosage instructions. There is also a hand-written annotation on the label, ‘A Purgative’. The wonderfully named ‘Livingstone Rouser’ was a medicine, in tablet form, designed to combat fevers and malaria by encouraging purging. The ‘tabloids’ or tablets containing jalap, rhubarb, calomel and quinine bisulphate, were named after the famous explorer, David Livingstone (1813-1873). Contemporary marketing advertisements note that when the tablets, ‘especially adapted for use as a general aperient in the tropics’, are taken with water, the action ‘of these is tonic and carthartic’. From a Burroughs, Wellcome and Company medical kit, marked to ‘Andrew Thorne’ (?), ‘Grenadier Guards’, which was possibly purchased for use during the 4th Ashanti War (1895-1896).

4th Ashanti War (1895-1896)