In 1846, Warburg's Tincture was extensively trialled in Austria and, the following year, it was adopted as an official medicine by the Austrian Empire, by imperial order.
Nevertheless, the British Government was a significant client, procuring Warburg's Tincture for military forces serving overseas in India and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka); in Africa, in Gold Coast (now Ghana), Gambia and Sierra Leone; in the West Indies; and in Cyprus, Corfu, Mauritius and China.
[2][3] In 1867, in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom, Sir Robert Anstruther, 5th Baronet asked the Secretary of War why Warburg's Tincture was not being supplied in larger quantities to troops in India.
[2] " [Warburg’s Tincture] is an unfailing remedy in all cases of Intermittent, Continued, Continued-Remittment, Nervous and Typhus Fevers; Cholera, Diarrhoea, and Dysentery; Scrofula in all its forms; Incipient Consumption, Chronic Bronchitic Cough, Want of Appetite, Delirium Tremens, Morbid Digestion, arising from excess in the use of spirituous drinks, Scurvy and every disease of a scorbutic character. "
[citation needed] Warburg's Tincture was included in Burroughs Wellcome & Company's tabloid medicine cases of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
This omits aloes and rhubarb, whose function was a laxative to 'purge' the patient's system, an approach to fever treatment now redundant.
[32][33][34] Maclean contributed the chapters on malarial fevers and dysentery in A System of Medicine, edited by Sir John Russell Reynolds (the latter being "an eminent and highly influential physician in the Victorian era who held the Presidencies of the Royal College of Physicians of London, and of the British Medical Association"[35]).
Maclean considered Warburg's Tincture to be the best drug for the treatment of malaria and, in his lectures and writings on tropical diseases, he strongly recommended its use.
[3][36][37][38] " I have treated remittent fevers of every degree of severity contracted in the jungles of the Deccan and the Mysore, at the base of the mountain ranges in India, on the Coromandel Coast, in the pestilential highlands of the northern division of the Madras Presidency, on the malarial rivers of China, and in men brought to [Royal Victoria Military Hospital, Netley] from the swamps of the Gold Coast, and I affirm that I have never seen quinine, when given alone, act in the characteristic of this tincture....I have never seen a single dose of [quinine] given alone, to the extent of nine grains and half, suffice to arrest an exacerbation of remittent fever, much less prevent its recurrence, while nothing is more common than to see the same quantity of the alkaloid in Warburg’s tincture bring about both results. "
The liquor, when cool, is to be filtered, and is then fit for use.Warburg's Tincture therefore contained quinine in addition to various purgatives, aromatics and carminatives.