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Consumer culture, intellectual property law, advertising media and packaging developments have combined to bring us to a moment when brands are the most powerful business idea in the commercial world.
Contribute To The Brand Museum Project
If you are able to help by dating or providing information on the products, posters or ads on the site please get in touch. Likewise if you have any items you would like to contribute or loan to the museum.
Contact Ken@brandsandbranding.co.za or click onto the ‘what you got?’ button.
Remembering the happy Heroin days
South Africa’s Museum of Branding, Advertising and Packaging, currently residing on the free-to-view www.brandmuseum.co.za, has added a dozen or so examples of pharmaceutical products from the late 1800s and early 1900s which would raise more than a few eyebrows were they to make it to our shelves today. The products, several of which were regarded as suitable for children, brazenly feature ingredients that are outlawed in today’s medicine. “Opium” and “cocaine” (or “coca” as it was commonly known) feature in the brand names, and ruddy-cheeked children illustrate several of the packs.
One, a tonic hastening convalescence especially from influenza, claims to be endorsed by the pope, and there’s even an example of what was launched in 1898 as a non-addictive alternative to opium and morphine – German pharmaceutical giant Bayer’s best-selling drug of all time, Heroin.
Warren Hickinbotham, who sent in the photographs of these products, quipped to the museum’s mastermind, Affinity Publishing’s Ken Preston: “Certainly, these pharmaceutical products from the late 1800s give new meaning to the words ‘good old days’.”
According www.opiates.net, opium was regarded by surgeon Sir William Osler as “God’s Own Medicine”. The website tracks the history of opium from the first known written reference to the poppy in a Sumerian text dated around 4 000BC to Bayer’s launch of Heroin in 1898 to the 1991 drug-bust at a university close to the Thomas Jefferson Center for Historic Plants, where opium poppies were thriving. www.opiates.net says opium was probably the world’s first authentic anti-depressant. By the 19th century, vials of laudanum and raw opium were freely available at any English pharmacy or grocery store. One 19th century author declared: “(Laudanum) Drops, you are darling! If I love nothing else, I love you.”
Another user, the English gentleman quoted in Jim Hogshire’s Opium for the Masses (1994), enthused that opium felt akin to a gentle and constant orgasm.
Children were introduced to the pleasures of opiates at their mothers’ breast. Harassed baby-minders found opium-based preparations a depend- able way to keep their kids happy and docile; this was an era before Ritalin.
Sales of Godfrey’s Cordial, a soothing syrup of opium tincture effective against colic, were prodigious. But Godfrey’s Cordial had its competitors: Street’s Infants’ Quietness, Atkinson’s Infants’ Preservative, and Mrs Winslow’s Soothing Syrup. Indeed, one of the products submitted by Hickenbothan, Stickney and Poor’s Pure Paregoric, gives strict instructions: “Five days old – 5 drops, two weeks old – 8 drops, five years old – 25 drops, adults – 1 teaspoon full”.
“The story behind the drug and the brands it spawned is fascinating; we are deeply indebted to Warren for letting us add them to the collection,” said Preston. He added that serving the history of South Africa’s brands is the museum’s primary objective because “the influence those brands exert on consumer behaviour means they have also become part of the social history of the times, reflecting the fashion, art, literature, technology, health, sport and social norms of the day.”
“Affinity Publishing has undertaken to establish the museum and get it functioning on a commercial basis before converting it to not-for-profit organisation. It would like to engage with all interested parties to source and make available a wealth of referenced information, and in time, provide a venue to showcase a wide range of branded product, advertising material, packaging and memorabilia.”
Preston would like to hear from interested parties who want to donate or loan appropriate items, and in time assist by providing a venue to show- case this fascinating archive. If you are able to help by dating or providing information on the products, posters or ads on the site, click onto “what you got?” at www.thebrandmuseum.co.za, or contact ken@brandsandbranding. co.za.
The museum logo, in static and animated form was created by Roy Clucas Design Process.
