Feature: Exploratory medicine: Scott's final journey
8 July 2010
On 15 July 1910, Captain Robert Falcon Scott and his fellow explorers left Cardiff on the Terra Nova for Antarctica, aiming to be the first men to reach the South Pole. Famously, Scott and co. never made it back. What did survive - found next to the bodies of the explorers, eight months after their death in March 1912 - were the two medicine chests supplied for the expedition by Burroughs Wellcome & Co., the pharmaceutical company co-founded by Sir Henry Wellcome. One of these chests is on display in Wellcome Collection's Medicine Man gallery.
The early days of the company were also a 'golden age' of exploration, and it supplied, to many of the most famous travellers of the day, medicine chests filled with a selection of compressed 'Tabloid' products. Bleriot flew across the Channel, Stanley explored Africa, and Scott and Amundsen raced to the South Pole - all with these medicine chests as part of their essential kit. The chests were given free of charge, with explorers quick to endorse their compactness and efficiency (particularly when compared with the bulky chests filled with deteriorating medicines that the 'Tabloid' chests replaced).
But aside from Captain Scott's two chests, other Burroughs Wellcome & Co. products made their way to the South Pole. These were the photographic developing fluid supplied to the expedition's photographer, Herbert Ponting. 'Tabloid' Rytol proved a success with Ponting: in a letter preserved in the Wellcome Library, he wrote from Antarctica in October 1911 to the company, commending Rytol "to the notice of all travellers and explorers as well as amateur photographers…[it is] a pleasure to work with chemicals put up in such an eminently practical and convenient form…It gives fine, brilliant negatives and seems to be equally suitable for prints, plates and slides… all our developing has been done with it".
Given this endorsement, it is a reasonable suggestion that the majority - if not all - of the iconic photographs he took on the expedition came to life with Burroughs Wellcome & Co. developer. An image of Ponting developing his negatives in Antarctica, and indeed examples of his photography, were used by the company in its advertisements.
While medicine chests were supplied to the explorers of the age, Burroughs Wellcome & Co. also turned its attention to burgeoning leisure market. Special medicine chests and kits were designed and marketed to bicyclists, yachtsmen and motorists. So, when holidaying this summer - perhaps when at the doctor's being vaccinated pre-trip - spare a thought for travellers over 100 years ago and how Wellcome products, no matter the conditions, aimed to aid them on their travels.
What was inside?
Alongside own-brand dressings, plasters, lint and hypodermic needles, drugs in the medicine chest at this time included: cascara sagrada (a mild laxative, derived from the bark of the North American buckthorn tree); ipecacuanha powder (for gastric irritation, from a plant native to Brazil); Dover Powder (ipecacuanha with opium, for pain relief); quinine (for treating malaria, derived from the bark of the cinchona tree) and 'Livingstone Rousers' (named after David Livingstone and derived from rhubarb).
Top image: Extract from an advertisement for Tabloid photographic chemicals. Credit: Wellcome Images
