Pharmaceutical history and its sources in the Wellcome collections. 3. Fluid medicines, prescription reform and posology 1700-1900.

DURING the nineteenth century prescribed medicines underwent considerable changes. Many new forms were introduced and, as will be related in this paper, the multidose mixture emerged as the most popular 'wet' medicine.2 This study was prompted mainly by the large collection of sixteenthto nineteenth-century vials and bottles in the Wellcome Institute of the History of Medicine which highlights the growing popularity of the multidose mixture at the expense of small-volume preparations, the draught and the drop. Not so apparent from the vials and bottles, however, is the demise (also linked with the growing popularity of the mixture) of such large-volume preparations as juleps, apozems, and medicated ales and possets, medicines which mostly fell within the province of domestic medicine.