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A field guide to antique prescriptions from history & the specific learnings of this collection of antique prescriptions from Vigne’s Pharmacy in Sayville, Long Island (1895–1897) and Mehl & Schott Drug Co. in Leavenworth, Kansas (1935). They offer a rare and intimate window into American medicine before modern regulation existed. The sequential prescription numbers, multiple dated scripts, and recurring patient and family names reveal something extraordinary — not just individual illnesses, but two overlapping epidemics moving through a single small community: a malaria outbreak in Sayville’s coastal marshes and a respiratory illness wave in the winter of 1896, documented in real time through the prescriptions of at least five physicians serving one town pharmacy. The Kansas scripts, written forty years later, show the same drugs now wrapped in Harrison Act registration numbers and cautious “do not refill” notations, the entire arc of American drug regulation in two tow