Skin salves or balms before the 1920s?

[Benzadmiral]

This might be a little before the FL interest period, but what kind of skin salves or balms did people use before the Twenties? Specifically the 1870s, if anybody knows? Let's suppose somebody in 1873 gets a mild burn, or a sunburn. Did they slap chicken fat on it or some kind of grease, and let it go at that?

I suppose that in New York or San Francisco, doctors and barbers had favorite salves.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Butter. All elderly people in my childhood said to put butter on a burn.

Vaseline came out in 1872, and was widely used as a burn remedy, although 1873 might be a little early for it to be in common use as such. Unguentine was the first patent-medicine product specifically marketed as a burn salve, and came out in the 1890s. It was still the most common such treatment in the Era, and you can still buy it today. It's basically just Vaseline with zinc oxide and phenol in it.

 

[Stanley Doble]

I can't tell you the names but your local pharmacy or general store would have had a variety of salves and ointments in the patent medicine section along with the liniments and liver pills. By the date you name patent medicines were well established, mass produced and widely distributed.

 

[BobJ]

Since 1899:

http://www.bagbalm.com/our-heritage

 

[green papaya]

I saw a old western and the native americans smeared clay or some type of mud on a white man's skin to protect from sun burn

maybe they had a mud bath to soothe the skin?

 

[52Styleline]

1860 to today

 

[Seb Lucas]

Butter is not recommended for burns today. I used to facilitate first aid classes for government employees and we are specifically warned that butter causes tissue damage and on a fresh burn can keep the heat in the skin too long. Cold water (not ice as it damages tissue too) for an extended period and lots of air.

 

[BlueTrain]

It's hard to imagine people getting a sunburn in the 1870's, given their standards of modesty under most circumstances, at least for ladies and women in general. I didn't know, however, that Unguentine was as old as it was. It seems to have been popular in the 1950s when I was little, along with BC Powers, Carter's Little Liver Pills and a few others. Most of those things go back to a sort of Golden Age of patent medicine, medicine shows and outright quackery. Some had a certain degree of medicinal value, probably inadvertently, but there is always a certain value in just believing that a certain product is helpful. Cures all ailments, man or beast, and makes the hair glossy, too, as a free bonus.

I'm decidedly a member of the fair skin race and even started life with red hair, as did my wife (and our two children). So I got a couple of bad sunburns when I was little. I'll probably die of skin cancer if I live long enough. My father put potato scrapings on my back once or twice when I was really burnt. I imagine that the cool feeling did as much good as anything else. I've also heard about eating a raw potato for stomach ailments, too, but don't take that as a recommendation.

If you're in the kitchen a lot or fooling around with an open fire or hot iron, sooner or later you'll get burned, though probably not badly. Butter was the thing to use, too, as someone already mentioned. I doubt if margarine was considered a suitable substitute.

Even if our 19th century ancestors may have not sunbathed very often, they were still bothered by insects in the summer. Old camping handbooks from the Golden Age of Camping mention some bizarre concoctions for skin protection from insects. I don't have an such books at hand but some sounded like shellacking your face, the only part that needed protection before short-sleeved shirts had been invented. There were similar suggestions for alpine mountaineering for skin protection from the sun that sound like the sunblock that lifeguards put on their noses. I imagine there must have been a poison ivy epidemic in the 1950s because calamine lotion seems to have been another cure-all that was popular in the 1950s. It even made it into a pop song.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Washing with Fels-Naptha Soap was our fail-proof childhood remedy for poison ivy, as it had been for many decades prior to us. It's still effective today. You'll smell like a load of washing, but the itching and burning will be gone.

 

[BlueTrain]

Is smelling like a load of washing good or bad?

 

[LizzieMaine]

Depends on your tastes, I guess. I used to pass a commercial laundry when walking home from school and I would always make a point of standing under the exhaust vents so as to fully absorb the aroma. Still one of my favorite smells.

Some people preferred Octagon soap to Fels Naptha for poison ivy, but we were strictly a Fels family. Plus it was great for plugging holes in leaky gas tanks.

 

[BlueTrain]

My father worked for a large, old-fashioned commercial laundry up until 1963 and I spend a lot of time wandering around the place after hours when he was there working as a mechanic. He essentially worked two jobs for them. I don't remember the smells so much as I remember what seemed like a lot of antique machinery, probably all of which dated from before WWI. But it was probably not much more than fifty years old then. It was essentially a factory for washing clothing and bed linens. Factories can be fascinating places, provided you don't work there.