Last week my phone rang as I was cleaning up the dinner dishes. Picking it up, I heard my neighbor’s voice on the other end. “Hi, Jerianne. How’s it going?”
“Fine, Louise. This is going to sound odd, but I was calling to see if you might happen to have some drawing salve I could borrow.”
“Actually, I DO. I found it when I was clearing out my Dad’s medicine cabinet a couple of years ago and kept it because I’d never seen a tube of drawing salve before. It has ichthammol in it. Is that what you’re looking for?
“Yes, exactly! Joe and I were in Mexico last week and today he noticed a red, swollen bump behind his left knee. It looked to me like some sort of tick embedded in his skin, so I used tweezers on it. I pulled some of it out but there are still some black things sticking out, maybe its legs? Ugh! We’re going to the doctor tomorrow but I wanted to put some drawing salve on it tonight to help the swelling and redness. Can I borrow your salve?”
“Sure. Come on down.”
Five minutes later I handed over my half-used tube of ichthammol, NF ointment. “Let me know how it works for you, okay?”
I’d kept that beat up tube of dark stinky ointment because you just don’t see that stuff much any more, and I wanted to find out more about it.
What does “drawing salve” do? The purpose of a drawing salve is to help a boil to come to a head so it can be drained. Another use is to “draw” splinters or other small foreign objects up to the surface of the skin where they can be removed by tweezers. Drawing salves are usually dark and often stinky. You put a small amount of a dark, stinky, and sticky ointment on a bandage then apply it to the area right over the splinter or boil, leaving it on overnight and reapplying if needed in the morning.
My neighbor was looking for ichthammol or ichthyol, which she was familiar with from her experience growing up around horses. Today when people talk about using drawing salve they mean an ointment containing ichthyol or ichthammol.
Ichthyol was discovered in the 1880s from shale deposits found around the Tyrol region of the Alps. Layered between the veins of this shale are layers of rock decorated with dramatic and detailed fossils of animals and fish. Called “oil-stone” or “stink-stone”, Rudolph Schroter found that when crushed and combined with steam, the shale, also called “oil-stone” or “stink-stone produced a distinctive oil high in sulfur. Schroter named the oil Ichthyol, or “fish oil” from ichthys, the Greek word for fish because of the beautiful and detailed imprints of fossilized prehistoric fish in the rock formations that surrounding the veins of shale.
Ichthyol became a major success. In the late 1880s Dr. Paul Gerson Unna, a famous German physician used ichthyol extensively in his remedies for skin problems. Ichthyol contains approximately 15% sulfur and has anti-inflammatory and anti-infective properties. Applied as an ointment, it softens the skin, allowing splinters and boils to come to the surface more easily.
Ichthyol is still mined and produced by the Ichthyol Company of Hamburg and used today, but under different names. The most common are ichthyol, ichthammol, ammonium bituminosulfonate and ammonium bituminosulfate. My old tube contains ichthammol USP, which is made by mixing ichthyol oil with a small amount of lanolin then combining that mixture with petroleum jelly or white petrolatum to make a 20% ichthammol ointment.
Jerianne called a couple of days later, thanking me for letting her borrow my ichthammol ointment. She’d put a dab of the smelly ointment on a Band-Aid® then applied it to the inflamed area behind Joe’s knee. When she peeked at it the next morning the redness was totally gone and the swelling had nearly disappeared. The doctor removed the rest of the mysterious bug parts and it was healing well.
You can find ichthammol ointment at your local veterinary supply or on the internet. Rite-Aid has its own house brand of ichthammol ointment, which also works well. It isn’t a commonly used product these days, so if you don’t see it on the shelf, ask the Rite-Aid pharmacist if he or she can special-order a tube for you.
Watch out for ointments from China. There is ammonium bituminosulfate from China that does not contain ichthyol or ichthammol and doesn’t seem to work as well, either. The real stuff is dark reddish brown and smells like fresh asphalt.
