The New York drug company, Tarrant & Co., sold a host of medicinal products both wholesale and retail, including an unidentified formula once stored in this bottle embossed with the company name, yet its paper label no longer intact. Originally sealed with a cork stopper, and now empty of its contents, this example is one of 37 Tarrant & Co. Druggists bottles recovered from the SS Republic wreck site.

With a lucrative establishment on Greenwich Street, period advertisements referred to Tarrant & Co. as “Importers and Jobbers of Drugs and Druggists’ Sundries” as well as “Manufacturers of Fine pharmaceuticals.” Operative from the mid-1800s into the following century, the Tarrant firm offered an assortment of remedies proclaiming extraordinary curative qualities with dubious names such as “Tarrant’s Effervescent Seltzer Apperient” and “Tarrant’s Cordial Elixir of Turkey Rhubarb.” The latter was deemed a “medicine of extreme value,” recommended for those who “suffer excessive fatigue” and “mental anxiety,” as well as “nervous headache” and various digestive disorders, including “diarrhea, constipation and flatulency.”