Book preview: Behind the Mirror

If you want to know the value of a medicine, ask the man who has been cured by it—and then ask the man who died while taking it.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

I couldn’t sleep.

I had one of those summer head colds and was all stuffed up. 

Due to circumstances that mostly involve open-heart surgery and an increasingly opinionated body, I can no longer take the more useful drugs like NyQuil or nasal decongestants. 

I wandered around the house at 2 AM until I remembered something.

Vicks Vap-O-Rub.

I rummaged around the drawer where we keep the medicines. Found it. I opened the lid, and then…

Suddenly I was standing at the sink in the bathroom on Liberty Street, looking at the mirror above it. The mirror was the door to the medicine chest.  

And there they were: all the things that Ma commonly used that are no longer anywhere in sight: Paregoric, Vicks 44-D, Mercurochrome.

When we were sick, and it almost didn't matter how, Ma would break out the Paregoric, a liquid over-the-counter medicine that came in a brown bottle. 

Broken arm?

Paregoric.

Upset stomach?

Paregoric.

Bad mood?

Probably paregoric.

Years later, someone said: “Wait… that was liquid opium?” 

Yup.

At the first hint of a nighttime cough, Ma reached for the bottle of Vicks Formula 44 Cough Mixture. As an adult, I had always assumed it contained codeine, because why wouldn’t it? It was the 1960s. 

Only recently did I discover that it didn't contain codeine at all.

Instead, it proudly advertised an ingredient ridiculously called Silentium, which wasn’t really an ingredient after all. It was mostly a marketing name wrapped around a generous helping of alcohol and another ingredient with a name that sounded more like a railroad town than a medicine (Next stop… Phenylpropanolamine Junction!).

The rule of thumb back then seemed to be “In case of emergency, tranquilize the child."

If we managed to cut ourselves somehow, which we did with some regularity, Ma would unhesitatingly break out the Mercurochrome, and painted the cut with something that looked like redwood stain while saying "This will sting a little."

No. Not a little.

It would sting like the gates of Mordor opening.

Looking back, it's astonishing what we considered perfectly ordinary. 

If your stomach hurt, you got opium.

If you scraped your knee, they painted it with something that looked radioactive.

If you had a cough, you got something that really wasn’t codeine, but claimed to be better than codeine. By the way, it's also loaded with alcohol, but it will be fine.

Ma never questioned what was in those bottles. Why would she? They sat on the shelves of every drugstore in America. Someone else, presumably someone who knew what they were doing, had already done the questioning. Ma trusted them. And of course, we trusted Ma.

She absolutely was not reckless. She was doing exactly what loving mothers did in the 1960s. It was just that the rules of medicine were different back then.

We trusted the adults.
The adults trusted the labels.
The labels trusted chemistry.

We unhesitatingly believed that someone else had already done the worrying.

And everybody slept remarkably well.