1939 The Gentleman's Companion volume II Beeing an Exotic Drinking Book

THE GENTLEMAN'S COMPANION

indigestion, a pungent liquid or solid having been in recent contact with the inner lining of throat and stomach; from spleen and vapours of both general and special nature.... There are probably more old wives tales about such cure as there are spinsters on earth. Sipping water while standing on the head is allegedly effective; so is sipping water through a napkin-especially when the patient holds his, or her, own nose, while another sympathetic friend stops the ears. . . . Vinegar, to the amount of 2 tsp, taken undiluted, has salvaged many. The same faith is also placed in a lump of sugar with 4 drops of oil of peppermint on it. . . . In the days of our grandfather, a pinch of snuff was offered. Personally we always munch a cube of ice, continue the campaign along original lines if it takes all summer, and don't worry. I{i other words any shock of sorts may, or may not, solve the riddle. We recall hiccoughs being promptly cured once in Seattle, by a re– sourceful husband who became mildly intolerant of all the r doz or so friendly suggestions to his thus-afflicted wife, all of which had failed, and .who emptied a siphon of well-chilled seltzer water down the front of his wife's newest evening frock. The hiccoughs were promptly cured, but we regret to report the lady almost immediately departed for a brief residence in a certain well known city in Nevada. Even though we may be careful and lucky enough to avoid the curse of amoebic alimentary disorders in India, or anywhere in the Near or Far East, or in the Tropics generally, we sometimes become a prey-through nourishment on too-ripe fruits, or from other cause-– to what the old British medicos loved to call "coliks, grypinges, spleenes, vapours, and other fl.atulencies, or scours." It is a sorry plight indeed, and no remedy handy, so we append this proven simple as one of the most valuable we have ever known, and administered as it is a sort of drink, it is far more pleasant to take internally than the maze of usual hot drops, blackberry cordials-so called-and other remedies. THE BENGAL HOT DROPS, sometimes KNOWN in SINGAPORE as "RAFFLES' QurnT RELIEF"

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