Go-Away Pills

Go-Away Pills are the shrinking medicine used to counter Dick’s extraordinary growth in the Land of Magic Medicines. Intended to reduce an oversized body to its ordinary proportions, they first appear to offer a practical solution, but their mishandling makes Dick shrink far beyond safety. The episode gives the pills a double significance: they are a remedy for magical excess, yet, without careful measurement and control, they become another source of danger.

Purpose and Magical Operation

Go-Away Pills are prescribed after Dick becomes enormously tall, so tall that he must bend to keep his head from touching the roof while the little people in the medicine factory rush about in alarm. The factory workers call for a ladder and instruct him to take the pills quickly, treating the medicine as the appropriate counteragent to the condition produced by magic. Their urgency indicates that the pills are not an ordinary household medicine but part of a specialized system of magical treatment.

The intended operation is straightforward in principle: the pills make a person grow smaller. The difficulty lies in dosage. A pixie climbs the ladder carrying a box and means to throw a single pill into Dick’s open mouth. In his excitement, however, he throws the whole box instead. Dick swallows it, converting a controlled treatment into an excessive one. The scene makes quantity decisive: the same medicine that can restore proportion becomes hazardous when administered without restraint.

Dick’s Shrinking Accident

The effect begins immediately. Dick descends from his great height, becoming smaller and smaller until he reaches his own size. At that moment the apparent crisis seems to have been solved, but the medicine does not stop working. He continues shrinking, smaller and smaller, until he cannot be seen at all. The reversal is especially disturbing because the pills succeed at their basic task too thoroughly: they remove the enlargement, then erase Dick from ordinary sight.

The children experience the consequence as both physical danger and a failure of perception. Bessie cries out that Dick has gone and calls for him, yet no visible figure answers her. A tiny squeak comes from beneath a large chair, identifying his location without restoring his visibility. The object-world has become disproportionate from the other direction: a chair is now a sheltering landscape, while Dick is reduced to an almost imperceptible presence within it.

Bessie responds by adapting the environment rather than pretending that the medicine has produced a complete cure. She tells Dick to run to a pill box and get inside, so that his position can at least be known even though he cannot be seen. After hearing a tiny squeak from the box, she puts on the lid to keep him from falling out. The pill box therefore becomes a temporary container for a body made too small for ordinary social and physical space.

Limits of the Remedy

The little people explain that the usual Grow-Fast Mixture cannot be given to Dick because he is now really too small for it. A special bath of powerful medicine must be prepared instead, and Dick must enter it so that he can perhaps return to his proper size. Their explanation establishes a hierarchy within magical medicine: one remedy cannot simply reverse another, and treatment must be adjusted to the patient’s altered condition.

The factory workers also state that Dick should not have interfered with their magic medicine because it is dangerous. Although Dick’s accident results from the pixie’s mistaken delivery of the whole box, the warning broadens the responsibility beyond one mishap. Magical medicine demands expertise, proportion, and disciplined handling. The pills are not passive objects whose effects can be separated from the circumstances of their use; their power becomes part of the plot’s danger when instructions, dosage, and bodily scale no longer match.

Restoration and Aftermath

The special bath finally provides the corrective process the pills could not. When Dick enters the yellow water, the liquid changes to pink, bubbles rise, and a mist gradually takes the shape of a very small boy. As he grows, the bath grows with him, until it becomes the size of an ordinary bath and Dick stands in it at his original size, soaked in pink water. The restoration reverses the pills’ effect through another transformation of scale: first the invisible body becomes visible, then the tiny body becomes fully human-sized, while the vessel expands alongside him.

Dick emerges cheerful and treats the ordeal as a queer adventure, but the others have experienced it as a fright. Jo rebukes him for repeatedly doing things he should not and threatens not to bring him into another strange land if he causes further trouble. The episode leaves the Go-Away Pills associated not with a clean medical success but with a chain of intervention, misadministration, disappearance, containment, and specialized recovery.

Place in the Medicine Narrative

The pills belong to a wider contrast between ordinary family care and extraordinary magical treatment. At home, the children’s mother lies ill, looks white and weak, and worries about everything. A doctor advises the girls to let her rest, keep her warm, give her what she likes to eat, and prevent her from worrying. Silky supplements this care by offering Dame Washalot’s washing service, since the mother is anxious about unfinished laundry. These forms of attention rely on observation, rest, food, work, and practical support.

The children then seek a magical answer in the Land of Magic Medicines. A goblin recommends Get-Well Medicine for the mother’s weakness and worry, and Jo gives her two teaspoonfuls from the bottle after they return home. The medicine works rapidly: her headache eases, she is sitting up knitting by evening, and by the next morning she is eating a large breakfast, laughing, and joking. When the bottle is half-finished, she is up and washing and ironing again. Against this apparently smooth cure, Dick’s treatment with Go-Away Pills shows the unstable side of magical pharmacology. One medicine restores health almost miraculously; another, administered in the wrong quantity, makes a person vanish from sight before a second remedy can repair the damage.

Go-Away Pills therefore materialize the book’s recurring tension between helpful objects and unruly objects. Like the saucepans that cover the Saucepan Man’s body, the scattered possessions in the children’s pockets, the living toys of the Land of Toys, and the presents drawn from the bran-tub, they are concrete things that carry social and narrative consequences. Their significance lies not only in what they are meant to do but in how they are handled, measured, exchanged, and misrecognized. The pills make bodily scale visible as a fragile condition: a person may be too large for a room, too small to be seen, or restored only when medicine and environment are made to fit one another.