About 80,000 people visit the House of Happy Walls at Jack London State Park every year, taking the time to view the displays of the author’s life and that of his wife Charmian London, and their journey together on the Snark to the South Seas in the early years of the 20th century.
But few of them pay as much attention to the 10-inch long black leather case packed with narrow vials as did Richard Rocco on his visit last year. An associate professor of pharmacology at Samuel Merritt University in Oakland, he wondered what those vials contained, thinking they might provide a “historical snapshot” of medicine used 100 years ago.
The kit had been on display at the park’s visitors center-cum-museum for 30 years, with a sign reading “Medicine Kit from the Snark,” and the labels alone on the narrow vials were tantalizing. One vial read Morphine Sulfate, another Terpin Hydrate & Heroin; one called “Dover’s Powder” contained opium.
“I thought well, that’s interesting,” said Rocco. “I started to research the life of Jack London, read a few of his books – and wrote to the curator, Carol Dodge, asking permission to photograph and catalog the drug kit.”
“I don’t have a lot of time to do research,” said Dodge, who as museum curator oversees properties throughout the North Bay. “So I’m very grateful if someone does have the time and interest to do the research.”
She met Rocco at the park, and arranged for him and his daughter, photographer Denise Rocco-Zilber, to open the case and take the medical kit into a back room. There they cataloged and documented the contents of the medicine kit over a three-hour period, taking notes and photographs for later research. But it didn’t take Rocco too long to put to rest the long-held theory that this was the Snark’s medicine kit.
“Unfortunately, my research has led me to the conclusion that it was not on the Snark voyage,” he said. He reached that conclusion by comparing the 22 vials in the leather case – evidently a widely-available medical kit from the Squibb drug company – with several hundred-year-old Squibb catalogs he managed to dig up.
The Snark set sail from San Francisco on April 23, 1907, returning two years later when both Jack and Charmian London developed health problems in the South Pacific. Any medical kit on the Snark would have likely been sold in about 1906.
That was simply not true of what he calls the Glen Ellen kit. “You’d open the 1906 catalog and they did not match,” said Rocco. “There were requirements to change drug spelling and drug names throughout that period; Squibb kept up with those requirements… So by following the spelling and naming, you can pretty much date the kit.”
Instead Rocco deduced the kit dated from 1908 or 1909, meaning it was probably purchased upon the return of the Londons to California. But not much later: one drug labeled “Rhinitis” – comprised of quinine and belladonna – could not have been produced after 1910, when regulations went into effect disallowing the use of a disease in the naming of a drug. (Rhinitis is an inflammation of the mucous membrane in the nose; if you have hay fever, you have what’s called perennial allergic rhinitis.)
