Things of my youth: Petrolagar

Cookie is getting old, and there is a milestone birth ahead in the fall that reminds him of that.  

Cookie is so old in fact that most of the things from his youth no longer exist.  And that might be for the better, too. 

Take Petrolagar.  A medicine that my mother fed me each night before bed.

Well, I took it, not by choice.  But did any child who was fed it by their parents in the hopes of avoiding constipation in their children back in "then"?  The answer is no - your parents poured and you opened up until you were big enough to say "NO!" and not get spanked. 

Petrolagar was a children's laxative filled with mineral oil.   When it was new from the factory, it came emulsified and uniform in a creamy white liquid with an inoffensive taste.  Most kids didn't mind it in this fashion - we'll get back to this in a minute - and parents only had to give it a little shake before they poured it out. 

This was the only example of the bottle I could find.
The contents separated, but it wasn't gross, just white. 

The packaging was that of a milk or cream bottle - clear, wide mouth opening a white lid.  The label was sky blue with white.  I seem to recall that in the early 1960s, the font was different and the 'g' had one of those circle tails.  Anyway, it tasted better than that nasty crap Fletcher Castoria that children have been abused with for ages.

So this was part of my routine of early childhood. 

Until.

Until Mom brought home something different. 

First, the label said Cascara PETROLAGAR, according to my mom years later.  Secondly, the bottle was brown, the label orange.  And my mother said the dreaded words that children fear: "It's just like the other stuff, but in a different bottle."

So I opened up my mouth and in when the nastiest stuff in the world.  Christ that stuff was gross.  And if I could have verbally articulated it, instead of saying what must have been a BIG "Yuck!", the following words would have flowed from my mouth: "What is that nasty shit?"  

Reader, the taste was foul, the texture was off.  

It. Was. FOUL!

Well, the next day, I was getting ready for bed, and outcomes that nasty-looking bottle, and I refused.  Maybe I had a meltdown.  Who knows.  But no, I wasn't going to take that spoonful of muck. 

So my mother says, and even though this was 56 years ago I remember it clear as a bell, "Well I'll take a spoon just to show you it's good."  

So Mom opens up, that spoon goes in, and she spits it out.  

After that, the stuff in that brown bottle and the orange label went away and the daily dosing stopped. 

Now for the clincher - the ONLY place I could find an image of Petrolagar that I remember is this, which came from the Smithsonian's historic medicines collection. 

Now, the offshoot of all of this is that I continued to have gut problems for years, decades.  And then I had the lower third of my colon removed because of diverticulitis, and guess what? The stomach issues removed themselves. 

So there you have it.  Cookie is so old that his childhood medicine is in the Smithsonian.