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‘Morrison’s Pills/ The True Life Preserver’, 1838

© 2021 Royal Pharmaceutical Society

Description

Mounted coloured lithograph, entitled ‘MORRISON’S PILLS / THE TRUE LIFE PRESERVER.’, designed and lithographed by anon and published by Orlando Hodgson, circa 1838.

This caricature depicts the scene of a shipwreck. All of the characters appear to be drowning except for a sailor in land rig, with a long pigtail and tar hat who sits jauntily astride a large crate full of Morrison’s pillboxes which is marked “MORRISON’S PILLS For SEA SERVICE”.

He smokes a long clay pipe and has a glass of rum in front of him. The sailor says, “You Swabs may crack about your Life preservers in fair weather, but when a bit of a breeze springs up, Lord bless you any body can see its all flam”.

Around him personifications of various famous proprietary medicines flounder in the waves. They include a Friar who clings to a huge bottle of “FRIAR’S BALSAM”, two men wearing life preservers clinging on to crate marked “COLLEGE OF HEALTH” containing ducks which “Quack”, a widow Welch has fallen from a boat marked “Constitution