"Janet Baraclough" wrote
The message ews.net
from "Sue" contains these words:

It ought to work as fennel was traditionally an ingredient in the
gripe water given to babies with colic.

Wasn't that dill? (in Woodwards' gw, anyway).

I swear by gripe water. Strangely, in Glasgow there's a widespread
urban myth that it's the alcoholic recourse of slatterns, akin to
feeding babies on gin. As a young ma I was upbraided by another for
making my comatose baby drunk on gripewater, (instead of screaming
for hours on end, blue in the face, like her own). So I showed her the
bottle which listed the contents by proportion, "alcohol 0.025 %".

"Like I said " she said scornfully " twentyfive percent; that means a
quarter of the bottle is pure alcohol".

Oh I remember using Woodwards. Is it still sold? Yes, that contained
dill, and other brands and traditional recipes also similarly used
fennel in various gripe remedies. No doubt the alcohol content has been
banned by now!

I won't mention that detail to my son as he already likes to tell the
tale of how he was force-fed alcoholic beverages to keep him quiet as a
teething infant. The truth is slightly less scandalous. While he was
teething and we'd run out of Dentinox gel, I did once in final
desperation resort to rubbing his sore gums with a tiny drop of Drambuie
instead, on the dubious grounds that whisky used to be used as an
anaesthetic, and it was all there was to hand. Whether or not it was
just the strange taste or alcoholic anaesthesia, it worked a treat and
got him off to sleep! :-)

--
Sue