We have numerous bottles of miscellaneous contents in our historical collections, some of which are obviously liquor or medicine bottles, some of which are unknown.
    My standard practice is to decant the bottles into laboratory glassware so as to preserve the contents and allow examination of the bottle without worrying about exposure to potentially harmful materials. The contents are stored separately from the bottles in a secure locker, but
connected through accession records in the collections database. In some cases, chemical analysis has helped us to determine the nature of unknown contents.

    Michael A. Lewis
    Archaeology Collections Manager
    University of Alaska Museum

Jenny Yearous wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I have a bit of a dilemma and was wondering how other people have handled
> this problem in their museums.  We just received two Doctors bags from a
> father and son who were in practice together. The father started in 1906 and
> the son was practicing into at least the 1950's.  Well, these bags still
> have a lot of drugs/medicines in them including strychnine, digitalis,
> morphine, and nitroglycerine.  We are debating if we should leave the
> bottles of medicine as is, or if we should dispose of the contents (drugs)
> but keep the bottles.  So folks, what have you done in the past?

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