Almost the last item I catalogued at Dow’s was a cardboard box containing a bottle of Owbridge’s Lung Tonic with the contents still intact.

Lung tonics were common in the nineteenth and early twentieth century – in the days before antibiotics lung infections would hang on, especially in a damp cold winter, not helped by the smoke from coal fires and unregulated industrial air pollution.

Lung tonics were basically formulations to help you cough up phlegm and clear your chest, and occasionally contained something to relax you.

There were various formulations and products around, of which the most well known today is Fisherman’s Friend.

Originally a liquid tonic, Fisherman’s Friend was later thickened to make the lozenges we know today.

Fisherman’s Friends originated in Fleetwood in the North West of England, which was a major deep sea fishing port, and as an immediate hit with fishermen, who would have worked in cold wet conditions on the early steam trawlers. (I also suspect that to a man they smoked coarse pipe tobacco like bogie roll, which wouldn’t exactly have helped their respiratory health.)

Owbridge’s lung tonic was manufactured in Hull on the east coast of England. Like many nineteenth century patent medicines the bottles used were custom made and embossed with the name of the manufacturer, making them easy to identify, and usually made from a heavy glass which added to their longevity.

Hull, like Fleetwood, was a deep sea fishing port and had also been a whaling port, and like Fisherman’s Friend, Owbridge’s was popular among deep sea fishermen and whalers.

Owbridge’s disappeared in the 1960’s, and the factory has now become an apartment block, known as Owbridge Court, in Hull.

What I found particularly striking was the range of locations that Owbridge’s bottles had turned up in – Australia, New Zealand, Scotland, The USA and Canada as well as Jamaica.

Looking online, most of the bottles on sale on Ebay and Etsy are the heavy embossed pattern and seem to date from the late 1800’s and early 1900’s as opposed to the more standard screw top glass bottles used later.

I’ve already argued that the distribution of nineteenth century patent medicine bottles can be used to track increasing globalisation in the nineteenth century, the widespread distribution of Owbridge’s Lung Tonic bottles helps reinforce the point.