Fruit salt

[1] The fact that these were found in mineral springs led to the rise of spas, where people would go to bathe in and drink mineral-rich waters for their health.

[1] These developments led to attempts to replicate the salt mixtures found in these naturally occurring mineral waters using off-the-shelf ingredients.

[3] In 1852, the British pharmacist James Crossley Eno started selling such a fruit salt mixture from his pharmacy in the port city of Newcastle upon Tyne.

[9] In the style of patent medicines and quackery, they were advertised hyperbolically for an enormous range of diseases and ailments, only some of which they could ameliorate (e.g. indigestion).

[11] As the pharmaceutical industry moved away from cure-all patent medicines in the mid twentieth century, Eno Fruit Salt became one of the few surviving products of its kind.