"Real Men of Genius" - Civil War Medicine Edition #2

Here is another outlandish medical-related patent from the Civil War years...See my previous post for Edition #1. Enjoy!

Inventor: Henry F. Wiesecke
Place: New York, New York
Patent No.: 36,816 - "Improved Sugar Tablet for Containing Medicines"

"Be it known that I, Henry Ferdinand Wiesecke, of the city of New York, in the county and State of New York, have invented a new process of endowing sugar-crystals with a healing power, thereby rendering the medicines delicate, agreeable to the taste, and easily digestible, and thus preserving the remedies in their original virtue and power with more certainty than could be done by any other means or in any other form..."

Full text of patent here.

Excerpts:

"The nature of my invention is as follows: I form tablets of sugar-crystals marked with numbers in figures of like material, whose capillary interstices I disengage of the air contained therein and then fill up with alcoholatures, (remedies in alcoholic form,) whereby the remedies remain diffused among the sugar crystals, even after the vehicle of them—the alcohol—has evaporated."

"To endow these tablets of sugar-crystals with a healing power they are placed in a transparent vessel so constructed as to be hermetically closed and rendered free of air to the greatest possible degree. The air is then exhausted while the tablets are yet warm, their capillary interstices being then most expanded."

(It gets better!)

"The respective tablets are distinguished by four hundred and twelve different numbers, as they are designed to cure four hundred and twelve various phases of sickness, of which a full description is given in a work written by me and entitled "Fountain of Health," for which reason the remedies therein designated with numbers correspond with the numbers of those tablets which contain the suitable remedies."

"From what has been said it clearly follows that my tablets of sugar-crystals widely differ from the ordinary compositions of sugar on account of their new configuration and shape, as there exist no tablets of sugar-crystals, either in this country or in any foreign country, which bear numbers increasing in the same ratio and corresponding with like numbers, wherewith in a medical work the various remedies for stated diseases have been designated."