Soothing syrups and teething powders: regulating proprietary drugs in Australia, 1860-1910.

In the hot summer months of nineteenth-century colonial Australia, a quiet dread descended upon parents of the very young. Diarrhoea was about to assert its role as the greatest single threat to the lives of their infants.1 Between 1875 and 1900 Australian vital statistical records matched those of Europe, Britain and America,2 revealing a pattern in which infant diarrhoeal mortality accounted for no less than a quarter, and possibly one half, of all infant deaths.3 In the early twentieth century, summer diarrhoea was referred