What do you remember from your parents’ medicine cabinet from your childhood? I remember lots of things, few of them pleasant. Perhaps one day I might come back to Phillips Milk of Magnesia (for constipation) or Merthiolate, the mercury-infused antiseptic that stung an open cut like something applied by the Devil himself. I only recall one home remedy that was really pleasant. When I got a cough or a sore throat, the go-to was Smith Brothers’ Cough Drops (wild cherry flavor, thank you). Was it medicine? Was it candy? We will come back to that.

It is funny how topics come to me for this thematically-meandering blog. One of my readers who appreciates oddball memorabilia as much as I do made a recent comment about the blue bottle of Phillips Milk of Magnesia. I started wondering if they still made the stuff and began looking into it. But then I stopped – might this fellow (who shall remain nameless to keep him clear of the kind of public pressure that fame in this space can bring) be inclined to dive into the interesting history of one of America’s most venerable laxative products?

This was the point at which I began remembering the other product’s in Mom’s medicine chest. You must understand that I never questioned any of the things there. My mother was a 1954 graduate of Fort Wayne’s Lutheran Hospital School of Nursing. And unlike many other nurses-turned-mothers of that time, Mom actually made her living as a practicing nurse. And nurses know everything medical, as we all know. So if Mom chose to buy Phillips Milk of Magnesia instead of Ex-Lax (or the mixture of prune juice and apricot juice that was reputedly known at one of the local hospitals as “The Parkview Bomb”), who was I to question it?

On further reflection, I am starting to wonder if the Smith Brothers’ Cough Drops were actually something in my grandma’s medicine chest. She was a 1927 graduate of that same nursing school. But if there was anything that we were absolutely sure of in the late 1960’s, it was that people who learned stuff in the 1920’s didn’t know what they were talking about. Today, of course, we are starting to give some respect to those students of a century ago while we question those who learned things in the 50’s. I know, my own day is coming. I learned law in the 80’s. Fortunately, I have retired from that discipline so that it no longer matters if everything I learned turns out to have been crap. But I digress.

Did you know that Smith Brothers’ Cough Drops (in their original licorice, or “black” variety) was the first commercially available cough and sore throat remedy in the United States? And, if we want to get even deeper into Mr. Ripley’s world of Believe It Or Not, that they are still available today?

James Smith emigrated from Scotland (via Quebec) to Poughkeepsie, NY in the 1840’s and opened a combination confection shop/restaurant called James Smith & Son. In 1852 he bought a recipe for cough drops from an itinerant peddler. He cooked up a batch and sent his two sons, William and Andrew, out into the community to sell them. The drops must have been a hit, because there was something for the boys to take over after James died in 1866.

The drops proved to be such a hit with local sufferers of dry and scratchy throats that others began selling copycat versions, which caused the brothers to create one of the most famous trademarks in the world. At least at one time. Individual boxes, decorated with portraits of the brothers, in such a way that wags of the day (and of most of the next century) joked that the brothers’ names were Trade and Mark.

After the deaths of Andrew (Mark) in 1895 and William (Trade) in 1913, two additional generations of Smiths ran the business from Poughkeepsie . . .

. . . (with another manufacturing plant in Michigan City, Indiana) until the last of them died in 1962. Along the way, they added a menthol variety, cough syrup, and finally the Wild Cherry flavor cough drops.

The family did a solid job of keeping the product fresh, even advertising in comic books. What kid of 1950 wouldn’t want a Chugga Mota for his bike? Even the old Smith Brothers Restaurant remained open as a going concern during most of this time. Sadly, after the last of the active generation died, the heirs apparently decided that they were too good to keep running a cough drop business and sold out to Warner Lambert in 1963.

From there, things went as expected with Warner-Lambert selling the brand in 1972 to something called F&F Foods from Chicago, which continued riding Smith Bros. into the ground before offloading it to a California private equity fund (GemCap) in 2011, which, in turn, dealt it to another fund in 2014, York Capital Management. Which pronounced the bearded brothers dead in 2016.

But, in the style of every great monster movie, the venerable remedy was not actually dead, but just badly wounded. Lanes Brands, the U.S. subsidiary of a U.K. company, began making the drops again in 2017, which are currently sold Stateside by BT Remedies, LLC of Trevose, PA. You can buy the modern formulation (which may or may not be the original formula) on Amazon in Honey Lemon, Warm Apple Pie, Black Licorice and my choice, Wild Cherry. Which I bought.

Do they taste like the Wild Cherry Smith Brothers’ Cough Drops of my youth? I have no idea, because I will confess that I am one of the ungrateful and unreliable consumers who kind of forgot about them some time in the 1970’s. I believe the drops themselves are different, lacking the “S.B.” molded into the drop like the old ones. Did you know that Smith Brothers’ once made paperweights that were made to look like their cough drops? I didn’t either.

And I must come back to that question that is surely on the minds of my highly inquisitive readership – do these things actually have any medicinal benefits? Or are they just fancy candy. The answer is yes and yes. The active ingredient is pectin – the fruit-derived substance that thickens jams and jellies. Pectin, it seems, forms a viscous, protective coating over inflamed throat tissue. The informed folks who write about such things call it a demulcent effect – meaning that it soothes. The good news is that pectin appears to have no side effects, so whether you seek relief from a sore throat or just feel like sucking on a piece of hard candy, Smith Brothers’ Cough Drops fit the bill. Oh wait – now they call them Smith Brothers’ Throat Drops. I guess the Federal Trade Commission never sleeps.

So, now you know! Hard as it is to believe, a cough and sore throat remedy being commercially sold before the Civil War remains available to do the same thing for us today. The bag I just bought is now sitting in my own medicine chest, awaiting my next sore throat. If, that is, I can avoid the desire to treat them like candy before then. Either way, I am all set to party like it’s 1849!