Japan … Killer materials discovered in the contents of 160-year-old bottles

Researchers in Japan have uncovered strange contents inside antique bottles dating back to the 19th century.

The researchers from Osaka University said that the medical group inside a wooden box belongs to Ogata Kwan, a major supporter of Western medicine in the late period of feudalism in Japan, according to the British newspaper “Daily Mail”.

Kwan built the first smallpox clinics in Japan and established the Academy of Western Technology and Medicine that laid the foundation for Osaka University.

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And because researchers had difficulty knowing the contents of the box because it is so old and fragile, that almost half of it cannot be opened without destroying it, they resorted to the use of muons, which are elementary particles that can pass through the material without harming it to look through the bottles that are 3 mm thick.

When muons collide with a substance, they generate light with different properties depending on the substance.
Among those mysterious contents inside the wooden box was a white powder, mercury chloride, which was a popular remedy used at that time as a laxative for constipation and for treating ulcers, syphilis and rheumatism, before the discovery of antibiotics.

But researchers noted that mercury chloride is very toxic and can lead to kidney failure, and its side effects include stomach pain, bloody vomiting and a burning sensation in the throat and mouth.

Patients swallow, inhale, inject, or apply the substance to their skin, depending on the nature of their illness.

The use of mercury chloride in medicine dates back at least to the Middle Ages, when Arab doctors used it to disinfect wounds.

The researchers also found, through the use of x-rays, that the antique medicine bottles in the wooden box were made of lead glass and potash.

“This will be a new method for the non-destructive analysis of such cultural properties,” they assert in a research paper published in the Journal of Natural Medicines.