and reminiscing, to when you could buy your painkillers in those brown glass bottles, but what was the purpose of the cotton wool stuffed in the neck of the bottles ??
ummmm is 100% correct.
When I was teenager I used to deilver(on a push bike) prescriptions to patients.
I wondered this too, and what ummmm says is what the Chemist told me.
I can remember the cotton wool in tablet bottles - but my first experience of ribbed items (before condoms.....) was the horrible tight sweaty choking polo necks mother made me wear.