The following is an excerpt from a memoir written by Jesse Green, recounting tales of life in early Dayton and promoting a truly terrifying prescription for cholera:

“The next day after reaching home, I was taken down with the scarlet fever, which we supposed was contracted on a trip to St. Louis a short time previous.  This came very near to ending my earthly career, being the first and only time I ever fainted.  We had a German doctor who bled me with a high fever on.  I keeled over and was unconscious for quite a spell.  This was my first severe attack of sickness, but afterwards I had five others equally as severe, scarlet fever, lung-fever or pneumonia, inflamation of the bowels, cholera on route to California in 1849, and a fall on my head and shoulders, that came near to proving fatal.  I was saved in my attack of cholera by a prescription found in a medicine chest we bought in St. Louis put up by Dr. Westbrook.  It proved successful in every case where I knew it to be used.

“I will herewith give the formula from Dr. Westbrook:

Camphor                     6 grains
Capsicum                    6 grains            One dose in severe cases,
Blue-Mass                   6 grains            to be repeated often if
Pow’d Opium              3 grains            necessary.  1/2 dose
Prepared Chalk         20 grains            sufficient in mild cases.

“Some doctors claim that this is too large a dose, but I took three or four full doses myself.  It should be repeated every ten or fifteen minutes, but in mild cases of cholera morbus I found that a half dose was sufficient, and soon effected a cure.”