In 1900, a young George Hausman incorporated the Hausman Drug Company in Trinidad, Colorado. The company manufactured common pharmaceuticals to be sold around the region and sometimes even developed its own tinctures, including one product called “Mexican Oil,” which consisted of, among other ingredients, 70% alcohol and 1-3/4% opium, according to historical documents. The over-the-counter medicine was thought to cure stomach aches, relieve minor burns and bug bites, and help muscle aches and pains.
Hausman’s business venture produced and sold medicine and various elixirs for 90 years, well past his retirement in 1946. Today, remnants of the Hausman Drug Company still exist. A small bottle with a blue and white label that reads “Aceite Mexicano Marca De Hausman” sits on display at the Strauss Health Sciences Library on the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. The bottle was never completely emptied. A thick, dark goo lines the bottom of the container.
A look inside one of the Hausman drugstores. Trinidad, Colorado, 1900-1913. History Colorado. 84.193.991.
At some point, Robert Shikes, MD, professor emeritus of pathology at the CU School of Medicine, acquired the bottle for his collection of medical artifacts, which were eventually donated to the library a few years before his death in 2020. A portion of the more than 1,000 items of the collection are now on display as part of the library exhibit that showcases antique medicine bottles. Others are in storage and some can be viewed in the library’s digital repository.
“We’re proud to have this collection,” says Wendy Kisicki, a technical services specialist who helps develop the library’s artifact exhibits. “To see the different kinds of bottles and containers is quite interesting, because you can imagine walking into a pharmacy in the early 20th century and see these line the walls. There’s a lot you can learn about the historical development of pharmaceuticals and medicine by examining the various containers and their content labels.”
Beauty among the history
The glass medicine bottles on display all range in size and shape. Some of them are dark in color — this is because sunlight can sometimes alter some medications, and dark glass was used as a protective measure. Many containers showcase uniquely designed labels or hand-written labels if the medicine was mixed by a pharmacist on-site.
“With the prescription bottles, you can see connections to today’s medicine,” Kisicki says. “These had hand-mixed compounds and included information on dosage and frequence of use.”
Antique medicine bottles from the Shikes collection.
The library’s first floor installment of the Shikes collection is dedicated to Colorado bottles. Items hail from all four corners of the state, including Julesburg, Pueblo, Durango, Telluride, Cripple Creek, Cañon City, Fort Collins, and Denver.
Researchers can date glass medicinal bottles back to 2250 B.C., but they became especially popular in the 17th and 18th centuries. Glass didn’t react with many of the ingredients in the medicines, so it was considered a more stable option than other materials, like ceramic.
Over the years, glass bottles evolved, and some were patented for their unique designs. By the 1950s, plastic packaging was on the rise and over the next several decades, glass bottles would be phased out almost completely to the bright orange bottles that are common today.
“The beauty of these old bottles is something that we've lost in the plastic containers,” says Lori Micho, a special collections librarian at Strauss. “It’s easy to understand why, but that's the one thing you get to experience looking at and studying these antique bottles. There are many interesting shapes, sizes, and colors. They’re beautiful.”
Reminders of medicine’s past
The bottles also offer a glimpse into an era of the medical world that can seem far different than today’s.
One tall, dark bottle of the Shikes collection reads “Anti-Auto Tox,” a concoction marketed to improve liver function and relieve constipation. Autointoxication theory, which took off in the early 20th century and was later discredited, proposed that the body could be poisoned by its own intestinal waste. While researchers largely debunked the theory by the 1930s, autointoxication and the trends that evolved because of it still serve as a point of reflection for researchers who today recognize the connection between gut health and the rest of the body.
Other bottles on display are examples of patent medicines, which were non-prescription drugs that were trademarked, but didn’t disclose ingredients. Among them was the popular “PE-RU-NA,” a remedy for catarrh, sometimes defined as an excess of mucus. Samuel Brubaker Hartman, the Ohio doctor who developed PE-RU-NA, found success in marketing his patent medicine by defining catarrh as the root of almost any disease, including tuberculosis, many forms of cancer, and indigestion.
An expose on the patented drug industry published in 1904 revealed the concoction was a half pint of 90% proof spirits, one-and-a-half pints of water, and a flavor cube. The revelation pushed Congress to pass the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, which created the Food and Drug Administration and fundamentally altered what patent drug makers could say about their products.
A selection of Shikes's bottles can be found on the third floor of the Strauss Health Sciences Library.
Each bottle of the Shikes collection holds a story, some of Colorado history — like the Hausman Drug Company, which grew to two pharmacy locations in addition to the manufacturing shop over the course of nearly a century — and others of medicine’s evolution, from unsubstantiated and deceptive snake oils to today’s powerful and highly-regulated pharmaceutical market.
“The bottles in this exhibit offer a glimpse into how much has changed over the past 100 years. What is more remarkable is that this exhibit is housed in a place where groundbreaking work is happening every day — work that will propel us into the next era of advancements in medicine and human health,” Micho says.
Visit the exhibit: See the permanent Shikes Colorado Bottle Collection on the first floor of the Strauss Health Sciences Library and the supplemental antique bottle exhibit on the third floor. More information on items in the Shikes’s collection can be found in the CU Anschutz Digital Collections.
