Three early medicine bottles
photograph · 2005
LINK
SUMMARY
Wikimedia Commons file record, verified by direct fetch of the file page and Commons API metadata. The uploader's own description identifies the photograph as three antique patent-medicine bottles from their private collection -- Daffy's Elixir, Dalby's Carminative, and Turlington's Balsam of Life -- illustrating the distinctive branded packaging adopted by British patent-medicine sellers. The uploader released the work into the public domain worldwide (explicit self-dedication, not merely age-based expiry). No holding institution catalog record was found for this specific photograph; the four supported archives (Wellcome, Library of Congress, BnF/Gallica, Wikimedia Commons) were searched via media-search on 2026-07-25 and yielded no institutional record naming this item, so this Commons-only, privately-photographed source is used as an accepted residual for this role. A vision-capable review of the downloaded image confirmed three bottles are sharply photographed with legible embossing reading "DALBY," "TRUE DAFFYS ELIXIR," and "BY THE KINGS ROYAL PATENT GRANT[ED]"; the third bottle's embossing visible in the photo does not itself spell out "TURLINGTON," so the identification of that bottle as Turlington's Balsam of Life rests on the uploader's own Commons description (naming it) plus the shared "BY THE KINGS ROYAL PATENT" phrasing also seen on the confirmed Turlington bottle in commons-balsom-of-life-bottles-1755, not on the word "Turlington" being legible in this particular photograph.
NOTES
A photograph uploaded to Wikimedia Commons on 27 July 2005 and self-released to the public domain by the uploader, showing three surviving British patent-medicine bottles from a private collection, one of which the uploader’s own description identifies as Turlington’s Balsam of Life. The Commons record documents only the 2005 upload date, not when the photograph was taken; the year field on this Source and its Media entity records that documented upload date, not a confirmed capture date. Used as a supporting case media asset illustrating the branded-bottle strategy patent-medicine sellers used against imitators.