(Roughly) Daily

The first-prize design in Popular Science’s 1941 medicine cabinet contest. The improvements submitted by readers—drug lockboxes, his-and-her drawers, inner and outer mirrors—give some idea of the complex private-public boundaries that governed the use of medicine cabinets.

A ubiquitous element of our modern-day bathrooms, the medicine cabinet is also one of the home’s most particularized containers—stocked with substances and technologies used in healthcare and grooming, it functions both as personal pharmacy and private salon. Indeed, the medicine cabinet emerged across the early part of the twentieth century not just in tandem with public health policy initiatives but also, importantly, with the developing consumer market for the goods and tools of personal care. Its signature aesthetic—mirror, glass, and gleaming metal—would seem to have as much in common with the presentational seductions of the department store display case as with the sanitary spaces of the physician’s examining room.

As historian Deanna Day has written, stewardship of this container—as with so many of the domestic responsibilities associated with practices of health and bodily maintenance—has long been understood to be a task to be undertaken by women. A well-stocked and carefully curated medicine cabinet conveyed care and successful home management, while an overstuffed or unconsidered one ran afoul of received ideals of motherhood. Yet while women were responsible for the cabinet’s care and contents, certain products essential to their own health and hygiene were long thought to be inimical to it. Jeffrey Kastner spoke with Day, currently a research fellow at the Chemical Heritage Foundation…

Explore the history and meaning of (what are arguably) our most intimate containers at “Bringing the Drugstore Home.” [Via]

* Robert Benchley

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As we clean our mirrors, we might recall that it was on this date in 1963 that the first residential Trimline telephone in the U.S. was placed into service by the Michigan Bell Telephone Company. It was rolled out across the country by ATT in 1965 (for an optional $1 monthly extra charge).

The dial and hang-up button were no longer on a remote base, but instead integrated into the handset, midway between the microphone and speaker. A call could thus be dialed from the handset alone– more convenient in the kitchen or while in bed (though still at that time rarely in the bathroom). In 1977, Fortune selected the Trimline as one of the country’s 25 best-designed products.

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