A touch of the vapours

This glass and silver bottle contains smelling salts and dates from around 1880.

Maybe it was the tight corsets that they wore, but fainting was a common problem for Victorian women. Smelling salts, also known as 'sal volatile', for their ability to produce a reaction, were widely used in Victorian Britain to revive the fainted.

By Victorian times the usual active compound in the salts was ammonium carbonate, a colourless-to-white, crystalline solid that released the pungent gas ammonia. However in the 17th century, an ammonia solution was used that had been distilled from shavings of harts' (deer) horns and hooves, which led to the alternative name for smelling salts of spirit or salt of hartshorn.