Brown Gunk

I'm not sure why, but last night I got to thinking about health-related stuff from my youth. I remember my mother made me swallow a spoon of cod-liver oil (she insists it was my grandfather's idea) for good health. I remember this brown stuff they used to melt and stick on me. I searched and searched and Googled and Yahooed, and no luck. So, I telephoned her today and asked her. Go right to the primary source!

She remembers the stuff. She said it was called "brown plaster". She remembers it was like a crayon, tubular, and brown. You melt with match on to a piece a gauze and stick it where it would do some good. I forgot to ask her precisely what you used it for, though. She said it was so old that doctors nowadays never heard of it. She told me she had a little pieced that her mother gave here hiding somewhere, but she didn't remember where.

I tried looking up "brown plaster", and while getting a bunch of hits, nothing definitive emerged. I found an interesting blog titled Kilmer House, which is a history of the Johnson & Johnson company. Lots of interesting old pictures and stuff. The page about Medicated Plasters was interesting, but it does not specifically mention "brown plaster". It does have a nifty little picture of a bicycle racer wearing a "kidney plaster".

You would think someone would be selling some "brown plaster" on ebay, but no. So I am still searching for information about just what this stuff was, and who made it.