A bottle of "Nu jo!" ?

[kenthw]

Yes, this old bottle says Nu jo! on one side. It measures 5-1/2 in. tall by 4-1/4 by 2-1/2 in. and has an opening like an old Coke bottle (pry-off cap). Here are three photos of this strange (I think) bottle. Does anyone know anything about it? Thank you!

Kent

https://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b268/KentHW/BanksBottle008.jpg
https://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b268/KentHW/BanksBottle006.jpg
https://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b268/KentHW/BanksBottle005.jpg

 

[whiskeyman]

KENT...Welcome to the Forum...believe your bottle was a medicine... Nu-Jol....dates from the 30's to 40's or thereabouts...dug a couple of broken ones today from that era. Kinda neat lookin' , but minimal value .

 

[whiskeyman]

Did a little googling and seems Nujol is a mineral oil ,with a rather long and interesting history:...

Take old Bill Rockefeller. He got tired of farming and decided to hang up a shingle and practice medicine. Well, somewhere between an office visit and a house call, the Rockefellers discovered oil. Bill was quite saddened that the automobile had yet to be invented, so he bottled up the crude oil, gave it a pretty name: Nujol, and sold it as a cancer cure. [Beal, The Drug Story]

Years later when the empirical sciences started blossoming (empiricism was quackery to the stodgy old school of medicine in most of the 19th century; empiricism meant "testing" one’s theories [and therapies] and one just did not test because good science was good science and all that balooey) someone informed the Rockefellers that they really shouldn’t call their Nujol a cancer cure since it wasn’t curing any cancer and all it did was give you a good case of diarrhea. So Nujol became a laxative.

Next a group of scientists contacted the Rockefellers and warned them that their Nujol was actually doing damage. It seems that it pulled fat-soluble vitamins from those using it. The Rockefellers responded by fortifying Nujol with some vitamin A and released the new improved version of Nujol, which still leached vitamins and most likely caused cancer, but by the time scientists were about to confirm that Nujol, or crude oil, was not a substance humans really should be drinking, the Rockefellers had taken control of the pharmaceutical industry and they quietly dropped Nujol from their pharmacopoeia while promoting other remedies that would eventually have to be pulled also, but in the meanwhile, they helped these people of humble roots to become the richest people on earth.

Never once was a Rockefeller treatment labeled quackery. Oh, and as an aside, there is no museum of quackery in which a bottle of Nujol can be found.

 

[madman]

hey whiskeyman great info!! i think a nu jol was one of the first bottles i ever found mike

 

[Yooper14]

Neat history! I heard it had something to do with oil, but never knew the history behind it all!! Cool.
I've found a couple of those myself...I've been soakingone because I couldn't get the blackish residue out...that would make sense if it were oil!!
Tim

 

[kenthw]

Everyone says "Nu Jol", but that last character sure looks like an "!" to me.

Kent

 

[Yooper14]

I have a couple, and in person it looks like an "L"

 

[kenthw]

It is possible that the hot glass just didn't fill the mold on that last letter!