A 5" tall rectangular-shaped nice light TURQUOISE aqua marine COLORED antique PATENT (quack) MEDICINE bottle. This was the patent medicine that Tom Sawyer fed Peter the Cat in Mark Twain's book, 'Tom Sawyer'. This is a very early hand Blown Into Mold bottle (BIM) with a tooled top, dating it all the way back to the 1800's.
Patent medicine was a medicine that was prepackaged and sold by the local druggist. Perry Davis Vegetable Pain Killer was a very early American patent medicine that was embraced by the masses of American's, starting all the way back in the early 1800's. (Please do not copy my title, my pictures or this next segment of how Mark Twain and Tom Sawyer relate to this patent medicine. It was based on my own research and explanation so again, if you are an eBay seller, DO NOT attempt to copy and paste this information into your listing. For those who are not seller's, I apologize for having to put this negative piece into the listing but I have had to turn several other unscrupulous sellers in to eBay for this, a policy violation, and they are no longer with us. ) In Mark Twain's book, Tom Sawyer's Aunt Polly got caught up in the patent medicine cure-all claims of the day. Early on in the story, when Tom was being tormented by his conscience day and night on an unrelated matter, and he was as 'dismal as a hearse', she would fill him up with quack cure-alls. She heard of the Pain-Killer and, as the book states, ordered a lot of it at once. It was described as 'fire in liquid form'. Tom decided that as long as Aunt Polly thought he was taking the Davis Pain Killer, things would go a lot easier between them. So he schemed on other ways to dispose of the Pain Killer. After he filled a crack with it in the sitting room, he targeted Peter the cat who was curious about the product. Peter, thinking that if it was 'people' food it had to be good, was agreeable so Tom pried his mouth open and poured the remaining Pain-killer straight down his gullet. Peter shot straight up, delivered a war-whoop, crashed throughout the house, and made his exodus out the window, tangled up in the curtain and taking a house plant along the way as we went out. And there you have it, Davis Vegetable Pain Killer. This is an older bottle with a large drippy applied 'blob top', check it out!
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