Mentholatum Ointment

Mentholatum Ointment is a soft rub with a sharp, cooling smell, sold in a small squat jar. The American jar is green plastic with a white ribbed cap and a label reading "Original Ointment"; its active ingredients are camphor and menthol in a petroleum-jelly base. It is rubbed on the chest, throat and back for a cold, or on sore muscles, and in its early advertising it was smeared inside the nostrils too.

It was made first in Wichita, Kansas. Albert Alexander Hyde, a former bank clerk and estate agent, set up the Yucca Company there in 1889 to make soaps and shaving cream. One of its lines, a cough remedy called Vest Pocket Cough Specific, used camphor and menthol, and Hyde, intrigued by menthol, spent several years experimenting in his kitchen. The ointment came out of that work in 1894, and Wikipedia gives December of that year. It sold so well that the firm opened a Buffalo office in 1903 and in 1906 renamed itself after the product, giving up soap altogether.

Hyde sold it as a household standby. Advertisements of the 1920s call it "a healing cream", recommend it for stuffy colds, cuts, chaps, burns and tired feet, and introduce the Little Nurse, a small girl in a cap and armband carrying a jar, who became its emblem. Missionaries carried it abroad, and from 1913 the American missionary William Merrell Vories held the rights to sell it in Japan.

The company's headquarters moved to Buffalo after Hyde's death in 1935, and in 1988 the Japanese firm Rohto Pharmaceutical, which had held the Japanese trademark since 1975, bought the whole company. The ointment is still made under its name, still marked "since 1889" for the company's founding, and sold in one- and three-ounce jars, while the Little Nurse has lived on, on tins sold in other markets.