Help!
Research on subjects like this is never ending.
There are always unanswered questions, even about very well known patent and quack medicines, and on top of that it sometimes seems as though previously unrecorded bottles (1) turn up almost every week.
The most common source of unrecorded bottles and other containers is, perhaps surprisingly, existing collections, of which there are many thousands in the UK and elsewhere. Many are lovingly displayed, but others are packed away and half forgotten in a loft or shed. It's less common that an unrecorded type is freshly discovered, pulled out of the ground or a riverbed, or discovered in an attic or under floorboards, but that too happens with surprising regularity.
It's not only bottles and pots. Labels (especially when still attached to a bottle), pamphlets, flyers, posters and other original material all provide invaluable information that the containers by themselves can't.
So this page, HERE, is where, from time to time, I'll post requests for help with mystery items, tracking down information, and generally making progress when things get bogged down.
Even sherds can be important. This sad little group includes the only examples so far recorded of four different 18th century or early 19th century medicine bottles (2) and one otherwise unrecorded perfumers bottle (3).
1. "Unrecorded" here means unrecorded by me. Which seems a bit immodest, but at the moment my book research seems to be the only effort to systematically record pre-1850 British patent medicine bottles and similar containers.
2. Pale green glass Hornbrook's Drops for Consumption; Black glass Bickerstaff, [missing words], Chemist, Aldgate, London; Unrecorded black glass variation of a large Dr Solomon's Cordial Balm of Gilead (probably a Solomon's Place address variant, pre-1804); Unknown large dark green [...]ge Street, [Manch]ester, medicine (possibly Lignum's Antiscorbutic Drops).
3. Colourless flint glass Warren / Perfumer / Cheapside / London. Relatively common with other addresses, otherwise unknown with this address.