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Overview
This transparent, cylindrical, green glass bottle was used to store a liniment called St Jacobs Oil. The name of the product, 'St Jakobs Oel,' and the name of the manufacturing company, 'St Jacobs Oil Ltd. London England,' are moulded on the side of the bottle, and on the base are the numerals '6732' and a three-pronged fork.
'No home can afford to be without it'
St Jacobs Oil was a popular liniment in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and was advertised as the cure to a whole host of ailments including rheumatism, neuralgia, sprains, bruises and swellings. One 1884 advertisement, published in the Otago Witness, even asserted that it was 'firmly established everywhere as the Greatest Pain-curing and Healing Remedy known to mankind.'
A correspondent to the British Medical Journal in 1894 claimed to have analysed the oil and gave a list of ingredients. Turpentine with traces of camphor was the primary component, but it also included ether, alcohol, carbolic acid, capsicum and a very small trace of aconite.