The 12 Elixirs

Your body does nothing randomly. It is always talking to you. It is always telling you what you need to do to get well and stay healthy. Take a good look at yourself. Your health history and your healing prescriptions are written all over your body ... Listening to and obeying your body’s cues can help you become much more self reliant regarding your health. What are some of these cues? desiring specific foods breathing patterns skin blemishes itches certain behaviors What does a craving for sweet or sour really mean in your body? How should you best respond? What does the appearance and location of a mole mean? How does the location of your pain direct you to proper therapeutic choices? The Twelve Elixirs are your guide. They are your birthright. Mastering any one of them will direct you to better health. Such self-reliance requires basic knowledge and calls for the common sense health guidance once acquired at the knees of our mothers and fathers. Patient X grew back a chipped tooth. Patient Y regained her sight. Patient Z eliminated her chronic pain. They did so in part by partaking of The Twelve Elixirs. Mastering the art of living healthfully is neither complicated nor difficult; it only requires awakening the knowledge you already possess, and nobody knows your body like you do.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1883.

Powder papers, booty balls, and sugar tits— Lotions, Potions, and Deadly Elixirs has a cure for whatever ails! These quaint names were given to popular medicinal forms during America's frontier era that were said to cure everything from fallen arches to a broken windmill. Grandmas, mommas, and even certified physicians treated the sick, lame, and unlucky with what was available: barbed wire and horseshoe nails, cactus, pokeweed, buckeyes, you name it. Ironically, a lot of these homespun treatments actually worked. In Lotions, Potions, and Deadly Elixirs, a practicing pharmacist takes a light-hearted look at the most popular medicines from the frontier days and how they were intended to work. An authoritative "Frontier Materia Medica" lists common drugs, the dates they were in use, customary doses, and idiosyncrasies. The author's outstanding collection of bottle labels, advertising art, and rare photographs of "medicine shows" rounds out this colorful survey of America's medicinal past.