The Medicine Chest

Items

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  Soda-Mint

  "However, this bottle was not marked ‘poison,’ so Alice ventured to taste it, and, finding it very nice (it had, in fact, a sort of mixed flavour of cherry-tart, custard, pineapple, roast turkey, toffy, and hot buttered toast), she very soon finished it off. ​ ‘What a curious feeling!’ said Alice. ‘I must be shutting up like a telescope!’ And so it was indeed: she was now only ten inches high, and her face brightened up at the thought that she was now the right size for going through the little door into that lovely garden. First, however, she waited for a few minutes to see if she was going to shrink any further: she felt a little nervous about this; ‘for it might end, you know,’ said Alice to herself, ‘in my going out altogether, like a candle. I wonder what I should be like then?’" (Carroll 2007: 18).
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  Museum of Natural History Oxford

  On a sunny afternoon, July 4th 1862, an Oxford don took out four friends, for a rowing expedition up the Thames. The don was the Oxford mathematician, photographer and storyteller, Charles Dodgeson (better known by his pen name, Lewis Carroll) and his friends were the Rev. Robinson Duckworth and three children – Alice Liddell, aged 10, and her sisters. During the afternoon Dodgeson spun out a series of fantastic yarns incorporating friends and familiar places in Oxford, mathematical riddles, literary allusions and countless references to natural history.
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  Tabloid

  "The brand name ‘Tabloid’, however, stayed associated with things ‘reduced in size or compressed’ (Larson 2009: 86). It is this reduction in size that made the firm’s drugs perfect for travel, and the medicine chests in particular were designed to this end" (Liebenberg 2021: 45).