A Remedy for Everything

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I’m taking a mental health day by avoiding news and immersing myself in medical history. It’s a literary cleanse. I’m reading Sarah Stage’s Female Complaints: Lydia Pinkham and the Business of Women’s Medicine, published 40 years ago, in 1979.

Stage’s book tells the story of Lydia Pinkham’s colossally popular 19th-century cure for, well, just about everything. A few sips a day were touted to cure cancer, constipation, menstrual cramps, menopause symptoms, kidney failure, and so on. The target audience was women but men could take it, too. The active ingredient was alcohol.

Female Complaints delves into savvy, deceptive marketing. Remedies that guaranteed cures were all the rage at the turn of the 20th century, when lots of people distrusted doctors; medicine didn’t offer much (this was a half-century before antibiotics); women were embarrassed to talk about female “issues” with mostly male physicians; and physicians were squeamish to pry into patients’ womanly complaints.

Not everyone was duped. In the early 1900s, a few muckraking journalists got wind of the false claims such as Lydia Pinkham’s cure and Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup and wrote a series of articles in Ladies Home Journal. (Mrs. Winslow’s syrup was a mix of morphine and alcohol touted to cure fussy babies that later became known as a baby killer.) Good for Ladies Home Journal. Other outlets turned down the pieces because of contracts with drug-maker that stipulated their advertising deals would be cancelled if the publication ran anything detrimental to their products. In those days, according to Stage, some $40 million was spent on these kinds of advertising deals.

Due in part due to these journalists (but mainly due to Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, about the horrid conditions in the meat industry), the Pure Food and Drugs Act was passed in June 1906 and took effect on January 1, 1907. (Opponents claimed the law staunched consumer choice.) The Act stipulated that medicines involved in interstate trade must:

• a. Meet certain standards of purity.
• b. Carry truthful labels.
• c. List toxic ingredients such as cocaine, opium, morphine, heroin, alcohol, and cannibas. (The label was not required to list all ingredients.)

While doctors and journalists celebrated their victory and pronounced the so-called fake-medicine business dead, hustlers were strategizing. “In the long run the patent medicine manufacturers proved more astute judges of human nature than the reformers,” Stage writes. For example, the law only applied to labels, so quack-medicine peddlers promoted their false claims in signs in streetcars; advertisements in newspapers; and mailed pamphlets.

At the same time, the president of the Proprietary Association, the organization of those who sold these so-called patent medicines, issued a seal to anyone who followed the new rules: “Guaranteed Under the Pure Food and Drug Act.” They knew the sticker implied that the product must be safe and effective. In reality, it just meant that the label accurately stated the toxins within. The association assumed, perhaps rightly so, that most people would be convinced by the seal of approval and not read the fine print. (The “guarantee system” was halted in 1914.)

The peddlers also hired “testimonial agents,” who procured upbeat blurbs. One broker charged $75 for a senator’s endorsement; $40 for a Congressman's. Women were encouraged to write testimonials and were offered free medicine or the cost of a professional photograph. (They were told letters to Mrs. Pinkham would get replies by the maker, herself. Except for one thing: The deal went long into 1890s and early 1900s, years after Pinkham’s death in 1883.)

Sometimes reading about history soothes my soul because 19th-century wackiness takes my mind off of 2019 insanity. Back in my grandparents’ day, consumers fell for slick advertising and testimonials. They were lured by claims that preyed on their fears of aging and promises of quick fixes. Can you imagine if people today were as gullible?