I caught cold again last week. Call my immune system low-end. The last time I got sick, I should have ordered some of this stuff for the next time I'd need it. It was what my grandfather, Dr. Ralph Collins Farquhar Jr., D.O., a family doctor in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, starting in the mid-1930s, used to use to treat a cough. My dad, Dr. Ralph C. III, D.O., used it to treat my sister and me when we were sick, and anyone else who seemed to be sick. Any time someone walked into the Dicus Drugstore in Farmington, Missouri looking for Numotizine Cataplasm, or, as Dad called it, "Pink Peanut Butter", they knew they'd been talking to Dr. Farquhar.

It's over-the-counter, but it's next to impossible to find. I called a few drugstores in St. Louis trying to find it (I skipped the big chains--they're worthless unless you want a prescription filled, or film). None of them had ever heard of it, though they had heard of the company that makes it.

Google turned up two places that had it. Americarx.com was cheapest, at $9.94 for an 8-ounce jar. I ordered one and shipped it by the fastest means possible. The shipping cost more than the drug. I'll order a couple more jars and ship them by stagecoach after the holidays, so I'll have them for safekeeping. The stuff has a shelf life of something like 5 years.

It was invented by Dr. Samuel Alexander Gotcher to treat pneumonia and typhoid fever. It's now touted (very quietly, as I'm sure you've never heard of the stuff) as a cure-all for cough, mosquito bites, sprains, and for all I know, hangovers. I don't know about any of that. I just know it loosens up a cough quickly, and that the Drs. Ralph swore there wasn't much of anything better. Maybe codeine, but Numotizine has a few less side effects, although codeine probably evokes fewer questions.

How they used it was simple: Heat up the jar (Jr. used the stove, III used the microwave), then smear a thin layer on a washcloth and stick it to your chest overnight. Wash it off in the shower in the morning. After 8 hours of that stuff doing whatever it does internally, and you breathing its fumes--I can't describe the smell, other than to say it definitely smells like medicine, and strong medicine at that--your cough loosens. Repeat nightly until it goes away.

I'm sure there can't be more than a few hundred people who know about this stuff and still use it. But maybe I'm wrong. I'm just glad to have some now.