Phillips' Milk of Magnesia

Phillips' Milk of Magnesia is a thick white liquid, a suspension of magnesium hydroxide in water, sold in a tall blue bottle that must be shaken before use. The Original is the unflavoured version, the one Phillips himself made. Taken in a small dose it neutralises stomach acid; in a larger one it acts as a laxative, drawing water into the bowel. It is one of the few household remedies whose name became the generic word for the thing.

Its inventor, Charles Henry Phillips, was an English pharmacist who had settled at Glenbrook in Stamford, Connecticut, where by 1849 he refined camphor and wax. Magnesia was already a familiar stomach remedy, and in Ireland Sir James Murray sold a fluid version. Phillips precipitated magnesium hydroxide, thinned it with water into a liquid the colour of milk, called it Milk of Magnesia, and patented it in 1873. It sold so well that the firm gave up its earlier products to make it.

Phillips died in 1888, and his four sons ran the company until 1923, when Sterling Products bought it. Sterling spent heavily on advertising, mostly for the original liquid, and its magazine pages of the 1920s to 1950s, showing families restored overnight, made the bottle a fixture of the American medicine cabinet. The bottle was blue glass, and Connecticut's historians still call it iconic; the colour has stayed with the brand ever since.

The last blue bottle was filled at Glenbrook in 1976, when production moved to Gulfport, Mississippi, and the brand passed to Bayer in 1994. The glass has given way to blue plastic and the label now carries Bayer's cross, but the Original is still a plain suspension of magnesium hydroxide, sold as both antacid and laxative, as it was when the first bottles left Stamford over 150 years ago.