Lotions, Potions, and Deadly Elixirs: Frontier Medicine in the American West - Paperback

by Wayne Bethard (Author)

Powder papers, booty balls, and sugar tits-- Lotions, Potions, and Deadly Elixirs has a cure for whatever ails! These quaint names were given to popular medicinal forms during America's frontier era that were said to cure everything from fallen arches to a broken windmill. Grandmas, mommas, and even certified physicians treated the sick, lame, and unlucky with what was available: barbed wire and horseshoe nails, cactus, pokeweed, buckeyes, you name it. Ironically, a lot of these homespun treatments actually worked. In Lotions, Potions, and Deadly Elixirs, a practicing pharmacist takes a light-hearted look at the most popular medicines from the frontier days and how they were intended to work.

Author Biography

A pharmacist by trade and author by design, Wayne Bethard is the truest of drugstore cowboys. For three years he served as contributing editor for The Texas Outdoors Journal and authored his own monthly section titled "At Full Draw." He lives in Longview, Texas.