Sunday, April 26, 2009

A cure for cancer, I kid you not

I must be quick because I have a cake to bake, cool, fill and ice by lunchtime. It is Robert's 15th tomorrow so we have a family get together today. No. Not a prompt to blog about birth and its politicisation. But. My, doesn't time fly? My beautiful little baby is now legal to drive a car. And there are two conflicting thoughts I have about the passage of time. One adage tells that the more folk change the more they stay the same. Is human nature unchanging? Because our environment certainly isn't. I can't find a better way to highlight this than a clipping from the first Evening Post, dated 1865. Not an editorial piece but an advert. Often advertising tells us more about the times than opinion. But it is worth a read just to shake us up to the reality. The pace of change over the last 100 or so years has been phenomenal. Hope this amuses you as much as it did me, the language as much as the exhaustive indications.

(Left click on image to enlarge.)









WOW.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I was just reading about this "finest medicine ever knowen"

http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/imageserver/imageserver.pl?oid=DSC18540103.1.4&crop=4933,5623,3611,1171&width=586&color=8&ext=gif&key=

Where can I get my snake oil?

deleted said...

Probably was a cannabis tincture, and they probably weren't completely full of it either.

Ruth said...

Happy birthday to your son! I don't think human nature has changed in hundreds of years. We still see the same factions that were common in medieval courts.

I'll send you a link privately if I can remember your address - I have a new computer and all details were lost!

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the very interesting ad: it shows how much freedom we've lost since 1865.

http://kiwipolemicist.wordpress.com/2009/04/30/advertisers-should-be-free-to-tell-lies/