Throughout the American Civil War in the South, the “pestilential atmosphere” produced high volumes of sickness associated with warmer climates, including malaria, typhoid, yellow fever, and other maladies. The “miracle drug” for Civil War physicians was quinine, used to fight malarial diseases. Among the thousands of Civil War objects within the Pamplin Collection is this medicine bottle for quinine sulphate.
Dating from the early 1860s, it is cobalt blue glass with the following dimensions: 21/2″ in height with a 11/4″ diameter base, a 7/8″ neck, a 3/16″ rolled lip, a 3/4″ diameter opening at the top, and a 43/4″ circumference. The bottle is molded and seamed on either side with the seams stopping below mouth of the body. The bottle is embossed on its base “W.T.Co./5”
The embossment means that the bottle was manufactured by the Whitall Tatum Company of Millville, New Jersey. For additional information about the company, please see https://en.wikipedia.org/
For further information on the history of malaria and the Civil War, we suggest the following article from Scientific American titled “The Civil War and Malaria”: https://www.scientificamerican.com
An additional excellent source of information is an article from Distillations, published by the Science History Institute, titled “’The Popular Dose with Doctors’: Quinine and the American Civil War”.
https://www.sciencehistory.org