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Re: medication bottles



I would urge not to empty (or open) the bottles for two reasons.
Technically, the donation you received was not just the bottles, but their
contents as well.  If not appropriate for your collection, they may have
research and documentary value and be appropriate for a museum collection
somewhere.  Also, opening the bottles may expose someone to toxins.

What I would suggest you do is to contact a chemist, doctor, pharmacist, or
conservator to look at the collection and determine if their is any hazzard.
If so, deal with it accordingly.  If not, the best thing to do may be just
to keep the bottles with contents intact.  Even doing that, however, you
need to take certain security precautions.  Even if the contents are totally
inert, anything that can be passed off as drugs are subject to theft.

Catherine Bruck
University Archivist
Illinois Institute of Technology
Paul V. Galvin Library
35 W. 33rd St.
Chicago, IL  60616
312/567-6840
312/567-5318 (FAX)
bruck@iit.edu
http://archives.iit.edu/

-----Original Message-----
From: Archives & Archivists [mailto:ARCHIVES@LISTSERV.MUOHIO.EDU]On
Behalf Of Deridre Routt
Sent: Friday, October 12, 2001 9:20 AM
To: ARCHIVES@LISTSERV.MUOHIO.EDU
Subject: medication bottles


I need some assistance from the list.

We just received a collection of materials from a local medical society and
included in this collection, to my surprise, are 18 "medication" bottles.
They contain a wide variety of materials from mecuriochrome to "green
pills" (for disenfecting)to potassium pomemgrate (I think I misspelled at
least that one)which is clearly labeled poison. The bottles range in size
from about the size of a little finger to one about 6 inches tall and 2-3
inches wide with a 1 inch mouth. I would hazard a guess that all of them
are 20th century, the labels are all printed and appear to have been mass
produced.

I am presuming that we should empty the bottles -- uh, yeah they are all at
least partially filled. Does anyone know of any good reason why we
shouldn't empty them? And what kind of precautions should we take? I guess
I should ask, should we keep them (actually, we may not have much choice on
that one given the way this donation works -- the archives did not become
involved in accepting this collection until late in the process) or return
them saying they are too dangerous?

If anyone has had experience with dealing with these kinds of materials we
would be very grateful for any kind of advice, or warnings or tips you
might have.

As I get the list in digest, feel free to respond to me personally but I
will post responses to the list.

Thank you very much in advance.

Deirdre Routt
Librarian/Archivist
Douglas County Historical Society
Library/Archives Center
5730 N 30 St #11B
Omaha NE 68111
(402)451-1013
archivist@omahahistory.org

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