I Didn't Know Beans about Bile Beans

Today I learned about Bile Beans from a Cory Doctorow retro-nostalgia Twitter posting (which he, in turn, found on the Advertising Pics Tumblr):


When I saw this ad, I wondered for a second about how beans could be sold in "various sizes," but it swept past me.

Then a reader responded to Doctorow's post with this image from York, England:


Prompted by that word "nightly," which sounds more like a medicine than a food, I finally went and looked into it a bit more.

According to the expansive Wikipedia post I linked above, Bile Beans didn't have much if anything to do with beans, and rather more to do with patent medicine purgatives like cascara (which I've discussed a bit in the past). From the entry, I also learned there was a product called Dr. Williams' Pink Pills for Pale People, which I may never stop laughing at.

Ah, patent medicines. You reveal so much about the foibles of the human brain.