James L. Franklin
Chicago, Illinois, United States

It’s easy to spot a boy…
He smells of licorice, he smells of mice,
Of Mercurochrome, and vanilla ice.
—Ogden Nash, A Boy is a Boy (1961)¹

Visiting the World Heritage Ngorongoro Conservation Area on a safari expedition in Tanzania in 2018, I managed to scrape my shin against a sharp rock and sustain a superficial abrasion that required a simple dressing. Our expedition leader, Jonathan Rossouw, a Cape Town South African physician turned ornithologist-naturalist par excellence, suggested I disinfect the scrape with Mercurochrome and lent me a small bottle of the deep reddish-brown, aromatic liquid. I dutifully applied it to my wound and can happily report that it healed quite well. Being a child of the ‘40s, the twentieth century if you please, I had not heard the word “Mercurochrome” for years. but it conjured up memories of a similar bottle always handy in our medicine cabinet at home. The familiar aroma and stinging one felt when it was applied to a fresh scrape was my madeleine moment.

Mercurochrome did not cross my path again for several years. Then toward the end of 2025, while rereading Salman Rushdie’s seminal novel Midnight’s Children,² I found “Mercurochrome” used as the heading of the novel’s second chapter. In that chapter, the narrator’s grandfather, Doctor Aadam Aziz, a Heidelberg-educated physician arrives in Amritsar on April 6, 1919, with his bride Naseem, the naive and spoiled young daughter of a wealthy landowner. There is political unrest in the city, and the British have just passed the Rowlatt Act banning political agitation. Doctor Aziz, leather bag in hand, goes out in the streets to aid those injured in scuffles, “bandaging wounds [and] daubing them liberally with Mercurochrome.” When he returns to his hotel room, Naseem is horrified by his appearance and thinks he is covered in blood. He replies, “It’s Mercurochrome, Naseem. Red Medicine.” Then on April 13, 1919, many thousands of Indians are on the street and crowd into a large, isolated compound through a narrow entryway, Jallianwala Bagh. It is to be a peaceful demonstration, and those in the crowd are unarmed. Doctor Aziz has been swept along with the crowd into the compound. Brigadier R.E. Dyer, with a sharply waxed moustache and fifty crack troops, lines up in front of the narrow passageway. Unprovoked firing commences, and over 1,500 protesters are either killed or wounded in what is known as the “Amritsar Massacre.” Though Doctor Aziz survives without being shot, he is injured in the crush of people trying to escape. When he returns to his room, his wife, trying to remain calm, observes, “I see you have been spilling Mercurochrome again, clumsy.” “It’s blood,” replies Aziz, and Naseem faints.

Mercurochrome is the trade name for the compound merbromin, an organomercury compound synthesized by combining dibromofluorescein with mercuric acetate. The molecule contains a xanthene dye structure related to eosin. The mercuric portion of the molecule has a high affinity for sulfur-containing amino acids such as keratin, allowing for sustained antisepsis. It was sold as an over-the-counter antiseptic tincture in ethyl alcohol for minor cuts and scrapes. It stains the skin a distinctive carmine red that is not easily washed away and was reassuring to parents that antisepsis was being applied. The antiseptic properties of “Mercurochrome – 220” were first reported by Hugh H. Young and his colleagues of the James Buchanan Bray Urological Institute of Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1919.³ Dr. Young and his associates were looking for a means of using the antiseptic properties of mercury in a non-irritating compound that could be instilled in the urethra and bladder to treat urinary tract infections, including gonorrhea.

We no longer hear about Mercurochrome because, in 1998, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, citing its potential for mercury poisoning, reclassified it as “untested,” halting its distribution in the United States. Sale of the product has also been stopped in Germany, France, Switzerland, Denmark, and Australia. In many countries merbromin, the original Mercurochrome, is still available including in Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America (except Brazil). In the U.K., products marketed as “Mercurochrome” do not necessarily contain merbromin. In the United States, its use has been replaced by antiseptic agents that do not contain mercury. Povidone-iodine, marketed under a number of brand names including Betadine, is used in surgery for antisepsis and over the counter for cuts and abrasions. Surgeons favored the iodine-containing antiseptic agent for its dark reddish-brown color in sterilizing a surgical field, assuring them that the field was thoroughly prepared. Examples of colorless antiseptic agents now available include isopropyl alcohol, chloroxylenol, and benzalkonium chloride.

The poet Wanda Coleman (1946–2013) uses Mercurochrome as a metaphor for the many open sores she sees in need of healing in lives of the African American community in Los Angeles. In her 2001 collection of poetry, Mercurochrome,⁴ the volume’s title is made clear to the reader in a poem “Letter to My Older Sister”:

… love
As i live it seems more like Mercurochrome
than anything else
i can conjure up. it looks so pretty and red
and smells of a balmy
coolness when you uncap the little applicator.
but swab it on an
Open sore and you nearly die under the stabbing
burn.

In “The Sting of Mercurochrome,”⁵ an article critiquing the collection for Black History Month in February 2016, the reviewer notes: “And there are a lot of open sores that need healing, including the commodification of Black culture (“Paper Riot”), police brutality (“South Central Los Angeles Deathtrip 1982”). . . . For all that it stings, however, Coleman’s lyrics also advocate standing one’s ground. . . . Although it may often sting like a poison, Mercurochrome is Coleman’s lyrical attempt at a cure.”

In Canada, a non-mercury containing antiseptic agent is marketed under the name of Mercurochrome. It is hard to take the mercury out of the word. The suffix “chrome” denotes its coloring while “mercuro” refers to its mercury content. The word “mercury” is a study in polysemy. It may refer to the pagan deity of mythology, the winged messenger of the gods; the Romans called him Mercury, while for the Greeks he was Hermes. In astrology, the planet Mercury rules the zodiac signs Gemini and Virgo. In astronomy, we designate the smallest planet in our solar system and the one closest to the sun as Mercury. The element mercury is endowed with unique properties, such as being the only element in its pure form that melts below room temperature, which in its liquid state is known as quicksilver. The use of mercury as a therapeutic agent is ancient, and at one time the metal was widely used in the treatment of syphilis. The toxicity of mercury remains an area of concern today:⁶ as a therapeutic agent (concern about its presence in dental amalgams and thimerosal in vaccines), as an occupational hazard (artisanal gold mining, hazardous waste disposal, and electronic recycling), and as an environmental toxin (the mercury content of our seafood). As a result of the widespread use of mercury in thermometers, meteorologists often use it metonymically as in “the mercury is falling” or “the mercury has hit record highs.” Clearly, mercury is a fascinating topic for further exploration, but to paraphrase a popular trope, it is a story for another time.

References

1. Ogden Nash, A Boy Is A Boy: The Fun of Being a Boy, Franklin Watts, Inc. 1960.
2. Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, Picador Press, 1956.
3. Hugh H. Young et. al. A new Germicide for use in the Genitourinary Tract: “Mercurochromine-220,” JAMA 71 (20): 1483-1491, 1919.
4. Wanda Coleman, Mercurochrome: New Poems, Black Sparrow Press, 2001, p. 70.
5. Leigh Anne, The Sting of Mercurochrome, The Eleventh Stack, February 12, 2016, https://eleventhstack.wordpress.com/2016/02/12/sting/
6. Thomas M. Clarkson et. al., The Toxicology of Mercury – Current Exposures and Clinical Manifestations, New England Journal of Medicine, 2003; 349: 1731-1737.