Dover's powder

The powder was largely used in domestic practice to induce sweating, to defeat the advance of a common cold, and at the beginning of any attack of fever.

The following excerpt from a report penned by a Doctor Sharp, employed in the British naval service in the West Indies, in this case, in Trinidad, in 1818, illustrates its use.

He writes : At this period, thirty cases of acute dysentery also occurred amongst them and although nineteen of the number were men who arrived in the island from Europe on the 1st and 12th of June, yet, the symptoms even in them were equally as mild as in the assimilated soldier, and the disease yielded to the common remedies – viz – bleeding when the state of the vascular system appeared to indicate the use of it, but in general, saline purgatives in small and repeated quantities were only necessary with small doses at bed time, of calomel and opium, infusion of ipecacuanha or Dover’s powder, and this with tonics, moderate use of port wine and a light farinaceous diet generally and speedily accomplished a perfect case.

[This quote needs a citation]It was an ingredient in John Wyeth & Brother, Inc.'s La Grippe (flu) pills, circa 1906.

Dover's powder was part of a joke published in The Science of Health in 1875 and reprinted in Godey's Lady's Book the same year.

Her family vainly dissuaded her, and at last united in deceiving her by substituting carefully prepared potato starch in morphia bottles.