Equipment shortages included surgical instruments and mortar and pestles for pulverizing the crude drugs. Glass vials for holding compounded medicines were also a supply problem, especially after essential drugs were again available. Some of the shortages were eased, if not solved, by local manufacture. Lint was produced in large quantities in the Colonies, and glass vials were manufactured in numerous glasshouses. Even local manufacture of the purging salts and nitre aided in eliminating shortages of these essential items, and at the same time initiated the first large-scale pharmaceutical manufacturing in America. Numerous botanicals indigenous to the Colonies were widely employed in medicine of the period, and certain ones such as snakeroot (seneka), which was widely found growing in Virginia, would have been very scarce had not an adequate supply been immediately at hand. However, attempts to substitute other indigenous plants for scarce drugs like Peruvian bark were largely unsuccessful. There is no indication that hysop, wormwood, and mallows called for during the New York crisis were ever found to be suitable replacements for any of the capital articles. Wine apparently was more useful as a substitute for bark than the bark of butternut recommended by the _Lititz Pharmacopoeia_. Peruvian bark, jalap, ipecac, camphor, opium, cantharides--these are the drugs which the American army physicians wanted, and these constituted the most serious shortage problems. The medical supply problem was placed on relatively firm ground by the summer of 1778, having been established on the principles proven in the Northern Department under the guidance of Drs. Potts and Craigie. Furthermore, the turning point in the war had been reached. Even before Washington's forces went into winter quarters at Valley Forge, Burgoyne[153] had surrendered at Saratoga, on October 17, 1777; and, before the cold bleak winter at Valley Forge was over, the treaty of French alliance was signed on February 6, 1778. The torments at Valley Forge proved to be the birth of a new Continental Army. The War was still a long way from being over, and a variety of problems were yet to face the Continental Army. Inflation was yet to deal its hardest blow to the supply problem, but not even this could produce the chaos of 1776. The worst of the drug supply problem was over. Contents of Army Medicine Chests