Marketplace of the Marvelous (31 page)

Lydia married Isaac Pinkham in 1843, raised four children, and took on the traditional role of domestic healer for her family. She used old family remedies and cures from home medical guides, particularly John King's
American Dispensatory
, which combined traditional European botanic remedies with plants from the New World. She carefully noted all her favorites in a notebook labeled “Medical Directions for Ailments.” Her healing acumen brought neighbors to her door seeking advice and the homemade medicines she brewed on her stove and generally gave away for free to those in need. One of her most popular was a remedy designed especially for the health of women. But Pinkham wasn't selling—at least not yet.
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The Pinkhams were hit hard by the economic depression that followed the fiscal panic of 1873, and they struggled to remain financially afloat in the 1870s. In 1875, several women from Salem ventured to the Pinkhams' home seeking to purchase six bottles of her female remedy. Although Pinkham usually refused payment, with her family's money troubles, she reluctantly accepted five dollars.
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Her son Daniel immediately saw the marketing potential. “Mother, if those ladies will come all the way from Salem to get that medicine, why can it not be sold to other people,” he reportedly exclaimed. “Why can't we go into the business of making and selling it, same as any other medicine?”
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He was right. Advertisements for Radway's Relief, Holmen's Liver Pad, Dr. Williams' Pink Pills for Pale People, and Hale's Honey of Horehound and Tar filled newspapers, netting many of their makers a healthy income. She would not even be the only woman selling in the Boston area, as Elizabeth Mott already offered an herbal remedy and hydropathic regimen to women based on her Medicated Shampoo. Pinkham had her doubts, but Daniel and his brother Will's enthusiasm and her family's declining circumstances finally convinced her to go forward. By the spring of 1875, “Lydia E. Pinkham's Vegetable Compound” for “female weakness” entered the crowded patent-medicine marketplace.
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Pinkham registered her label and trademark with the United States Patent Office in 1876. Like most patent medicines, Pinkham's Vegetable Compound was actually a proprietary remedy. Only the name and label were trademarked and enjoyed government protection. The recipe remained a closely guarded secret.
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Both the name of Pinkham's remedy and the ingredients she chose owed much to Samuel Thomson and other botanic healers. Pinkham's notes for her original formula called for unicorn root, life root, black cohosh, pleurisy root, and fenugreek seed, botanical elements used for generations. Many irregulars still recommend both black cohosh and fenugreek seed to women suffering symptoms of menopause today. The ingredients and perhaps even the basis of the recipe itself came from Pinkham's favorite
American Dispensatory
, which contained descriptions, properties, and uses for every known medical botanical remedy. Even the author of
American Dispensatory
, John King, owed much to Thomson, as he was a practitioner of Eclecticism, a medical movement that came out of the splintering of Thomsonism earlier in the century. Thomsonism had also spawned strains of imitator patent-medicine makers who cashed in on public enthusiasm for botanicals and their distaste for mineral drugs to market plant preparations throughout the nineteenth century. Despite a general unwillingness to reveal their active ingredients, patent medicines happily screamed what they did not contain: namely calomel. While other irregular systems, too, influenced patent medicines making related theoretical claims, Thomson's influence in this field was far wider and longer lasting, with Lydia Pinkham a clear successor of his botanical enthusiasm.
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The public disgust with heroic therapies that helped to make botanicals
as well as homeopathy and hydropathy so popular began to make inroads into the practices of regular medicine by the middle of the nineteenth century. In 1835, prominent regular physician Jacob Bigelow argued that some diseases would naturally cure themselves in a critique of heroic therapy presented before the Massachusetts Medical Society. Bigelow understood that it was difficult for doctors to stand by and do nothing but warned that their attempts to intervene too often left them unsure “whether the patient is really indebted to us for good or evil.” He counseled caution and, sounding every bit like an irregular healer, suggested that the role of the doctor was to remove obstacles in nature's healing path.
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Easier said than done for many practicing doctors, who wondered why anyone would call for a doctor if all they could do was stand aside and wait. Those that did try to implement more conservative use of bleeding and calomel faced resistance from some patients conditioned to expect a big effect from medical care. It was a problem that both regular and irregular medicine wrestled with throughout the nineteenth century.
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Even so, by the Civil War, heroic medicine was in retreat. Regular doctors could no longer ignore the criticism of Thomsonians, mesmerists, and hydropaths or the economic threat posed by homeopathy. Reflecting evolving attitudes and the shifting medical landscape, Surgeon General William Hammond banned the prescription and use of calomel and tartar emetic from the healing arsenal of the Union army in 1863. Hammond's decision created a furor in medical journals.
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Hammond was compared to the “irregular charlatans” who “habitually seek popular favor by denouncing well-known remedies employed by the regular profession.”
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The criticism was not enough to overturn Hammond's order, however, and the use of calomel and bleeding decreased after the war. Some regular doctors continued to use heroic medicine exclusively into the 1880s, but most began replacing bloodletting and calomel with new pharmacological remedies containing primarily alcohol, opium, and quinine.
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Despite these changes, these new drugs were not a far departure from heroic medicine's emphasis on demonstrable relief from illness, as well as its often horrific consequences. Large doses of opium and alcohol produced side effects just as bad if not greater than those of calomel. Regular medicine's increasing reliance on drugs also produced an economic and cultural climate particularly well suited to a boom in patent medicine. Alcoholic proprietary tonics, bitters, and
opiate-laced elixirs found a ready market among Americans habituated to their increasing use by regular doctors. During the Civil War, soldiers eagerly consumed medicines laced with alcohol. The US Army had abolished the alcohol ration in 1832, replacing it with coffee and sugar, so patent medicines provided an affordable way for soldiers to imbibe without running afoul of military rules. Patent medicines soared in popularity during and immediately following the Civil War, with total sales of $75 million by 1900. Improved transportation, wider circulation of newspapers, and cheaper manufacturing costs also enabled patent-medicine makers to expand distribution in the late nineteenth century. At the same time, professional mudslinging over the use of patent medicines became a favorite pastime of regular doctors, who seemed to have no problem overlooking their own misuse of alcohol, morphine, and quinine, liberally prescribed. Regulars were likely just as responsible as the patent medicines they viciously attacked for poisoning people and contributing to the rise of medically induced alcoholism.
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Pinkham's Vegetable Compound, too, contained alcohol. Brewing her early batches on a stove in her cellar, Pinkham first macerated the herbs and then suspended them in 19 percent alcohol for preservative purposes. The end product came in at forty proof. Pinkham was herself a temperance advocate. But she had no problem with using alcohol as medicine.
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Alcohol was a medical mainstay of the late nineteenth century for its low cost and wide availability. Though it was first prescribed for its stimulant effects, the discovery of germs turned alcohol into an internal cleanser, able to kill germs in the body's hard-to-reach places. Alcohol was prescribed for a variety of ailments, from anemia and heart disease to typhoid and tuberculosis. In 1878, Pinkham prescribed herself a teaspoon of whiskey mixed in two tablespoons of milk before meals for pneumonia. This was a small dose, however. Many regular doctors recommended doses the equivalent of five shots a day. Alcohol was not just for adults. Medicinal doses for children ranged from half a teaspoon to two teaspoons given every three hours, certainly enough to inebriate a small body. Pinkham's own alcohol-based remedy advised three spoonfuls a day, hardly enough to cause serious drunkenness and certainly no threat, Pinkham believed, to everyday temperance.
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Pinkham's business operated as a family venture. Her sons spread
the word through handbills and pamphlets while Pinkham worked on production and ad copy. Although hesitant at first to get in the medicine-selling game, she had clearly done her homework on the type of marketing language likely to appeal to customers. The bright blue label proclaimed “
LYDIA E. PINKHAM
'
S VEGETABLE COMPOUND
: A Sure Cure for
PROLAPSUS UTERI
or falling of the Womb, and all
FEMALE WEAKNESSES
. . . . Pleasant to the taste, efficacious and immediate in its effect, It is great help in pregnancy, and relieves pain during labor. For All Weaknesses of the generative organs of either Sex, it is second to no remedy that has ever been before the public, and for all diseases of the Kidneys it is the Greatest Remedy in the World.”
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Although the label claimed to offer relief to both women and men, Pinkham aimed her remedy squarely at women. Like Lydia Fowler, Mary Gove Nichols, and many other irregulars, Pinkham believed that women suffered needlessly and ignorantly at the hands of regular doctors. She offered her Vegetable Compound as a way to help women, and she used her gender as a selling point. “Only a woman understands a woman's ills” became her ad slogan.
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Purchasers could trust that she was in fact who she said she was, too, after her grandmotherly image became the public face of the remedy.

Pinkham's son Daniel had hit on the idea of putting a woman's face on the label in 1879. On an earlier trip to Brooklyn, he'd noticed that “folks seem to be all tore up on home made goods” and he wondered how he could use that to his family's advantage. Several years later, he looked at his mother and realized that he had found the perfect model for made-at-home goods. At sixty years old, Pinkham had a maternal air and a warm and caring face. She truly had made her remedy on her home stove, and had used it effectively for years before making it commercially available. No advertising man could have made up someone better. Pinkham's grandmotherly face conveyed sympathy and compassion in a single image. Her gray braid pulled back in a bun and her respectable black silk dress and white collar instilled trust in her authority and the safety of her remedy. Who could believe that this kindly woman would intentionally hurt anyone? The label also convinced skeptics that there was a real person behind the product. The same could certainly not be said for all patent remedies bearing someone's name.
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The Vegetable Compound was not the first patent remedy to feature a portrait, but it was the first to use a woman. Pinkham's
photograph made her a national figure. It appeared in newspapers and on druggists' counters. Newspapers found other uses for her image as well. Because editors had so few pictures of women, Pinkham's face stood in for other news-making women, including the much younger actress Lily Langtry and even Queen Victoria.
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Pinkham's face made advertising history.

Patent-medicine sellers pioneered American advertising techniques and strategy. In part, they had no choice. With thousands of remedies available for sale and dozens of new medical systems, patent-medicine makers had to keep their product names on the tips of people's tongues with near continuous ad campaigns. Demand tended to drop precipitously when the ads stopped. In the 1830s, the emergence of the penny press, which generally sold sensational tabloid news at just one cent per issue, caused circulation to soar and bolstered the advertising of patent medicines.
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Critics condemned the penny press for running patent-medicine ads. The papers defended themselves by appealing to the common sense of their readers to judge the truth of the advertising claims. “Some of our readers complain of the great number of patent medicines advertised in this paper,” declared the
Boston Daily Times
. “To this complaint we can only reply that it is our interest to insert such advertisements . . . without any inquiry whether the articles advertised are what they purport to be. That is an inquiry for the reader who feels interested in the matter, and not for us, to make.” It was the same pitch made by irregulars to the common sense and judgment of ordinary Americans, and to their ability to make their own decisions. Patent medicines proved a perfect match for the penny papers since the incredible claims of the sellers nearly matched the sensational stories appearing inside.
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Advertisements for patent medicines exploited nearly every human need and emotion. They also appealed to the common man and woman using the same simple and direct language shared by all irregular healers. Fear played a significant role. Death, disease, suffering, and evil became familiar and grim advertising themes. Labels, too, came filled with skulls and tombstones. Pinkham's own early advertisements ran in single columns with blaring headlines that resembled news stories to trick readers into thinking they were news so they would keep reading. “
LIFE
'
S WOES
,” began one headline. “
THOUSANDS DYING ANNUALLY
, From Causes to the World Unknown, While
Other Thousands Are Being Restored to Health, Hope and Happiness by the
USE OF LYDIA E. PINKHAM
'
S VEGETABLE COMPOUND
, The Positive Cure for Female Complaints.” Another ad capitalized on a recent murder case to suggest the horrors that could result from untreated female weakness. “
A FEARFUL TRAGEDY
—A Clergyman of Stratford, Conn.,
KILLED BY HIS OWN WIFE
. Insanity Brought on by 16 years of Suffering With Female Complaints the Cause.
LYDIA E. PINKHAM
'
S VEGETABLE COMPOUND
, The Sure Cure for These Complaints, Would Have Prevented the Direful Deed.”
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