The Dispensary

What the Victorian trades actually put in things, written down for the people who made them.

This was a working formulary — the book a chemist, dyer or dentist kept behind the counter. It is candid in a way advertising never was, and that is what makes it worth reading now. Each entry links to its page.

The recipe for Anti-chill Pills is twenty grains of chinoidine, forty of ferrocyanuret of iron, twenty of oil of black pepper — and one grain of arsenic, divided into twenty pills.Read it: Anti-chill Pills
On aniline dyes, the book is blunt: arsenic acid is generally used in making them, and a fabric dyed with an aniline colour “may have absorbed a considerable quantity of that dangerous article.” This was clothing.Read it: Aniline Blue (Re- colors The most sensitive)
A tooth-filling alloy of the day analysed as tin 611, silver 388, copper 1 — sold as large, almost white filings.Read it: Alloy for Filling Teeth
Filling a tooth meant warming zinc amalgam in a spoon with a little mercury, then pressing it in soft leather to squeeze the excess mercury out before it went in your mouth.Read it: Alloy for Filling Teeth
Copper amalgam fillings were going out of fashion for an aesthetic reason: the newer alloy keeps its white colour in the mouth, while copper turns dark.Read it: Amalgam of Fusible Metal
There is an alloy specifically for injecting into anatomical specimens — bismuth, lead, tin and mercury — hard at room temperature, soft at 150°, molten at 176° Fahr.Read it: Amalgam of Fusible Metal
How to spot faked cochineal: the genuine article has a specific gravity of 1.25, and is commonly bulked out with boiled weld or quercitron bark plus alum and chalk in a paste.Read it: Adulteration of Cochineal
The alabaster recipes come with a disclaimer that tells you everything about the trade: they are for the gypsum imitation, not the real stone.Read it: Alabaster
Litharge, a staple pigment and glaze ingredient, is simply the dross scraped off the surface of molten lead as it sits exposed to the air.Read it: Acetate of Lead
Aldehyde earns its keep by making gunpowder and lucifer matches waterproof — and, the entry notes almost in the same breath, it spoils with age and decomposes in open air.Read it: Aldehyde
A trace of silver “adds immensely to the hardness of steel, and yet increases its tenacity” — hardness and toughness at once, which is usually the trade-off you cannot win.Read it: Alloys of Steel
Silver and aluminium in equal parts give an alloy as hard as bronze; at three per cent silver you get the colour instead.Read it: Alloys of Steel
Commercial almond soap was 100 pounds of white curd soap and 15 of cocoanut oil, perfumed with fourteen pounds of attar of bitter almonds plus cloves and caraway. The scent was most of the product.Read it: Almond Soap (This is a very white soap)
Tooth powders were bound with honey or syrup into a stiff electuary and dosed with aromatics, the phrase being “to embalm and perfume the mouth.”Read it: An Excellent Dentifrice
The antidote for swallowed acid is chalk, whiting, magnesia or soap-and-water mixed “about as thick as cream,” followed by milk. Households were expected to know this.Read it: Antidotes for Acid Poisons
Absolute alcohol was concentrated by sealing spirit in a vessel and hanging it at about 122° Fahr. over a sand bath near an oven or fire — an operation with obvious drawbacks.Read it: Absolute Alcohol
A Belgian patent for welding iron and steel: iron filings 40 parts, borax 20, balsam of copaiba 2, sal-ammoniac 3 — a South American medicinal resin, in a metalworking flux.Read it: Aluminum Solder (If soft solder is fused)
Anti-attrition grease — Victorian machine lubricant — was blacklead ground into four times its weight of lard or tallow.Read it: Anti-Attrition Grease
The book stops mid-formulary to teach you the arithmetic: multiply Centigrade by 9, divide by 5, add 32. Its readers could compound arsenic pills but could not be assumed to convert a temperature.Read it: ALKALIMETRY