# The True Scandal of Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound

An episode of [Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1484511465), 14 Apr 2023, 37 min.

Audio: https://podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/pdrl.fm/18db03/tracking.swap.fm/track/SxlTEPDY7xDg35RXkASs/traffic.omny.fm/d/clips/e73c998e-6e60-432f-8610-ae210140c5b1/c0ae8c6e-22f0-4e9b-ac1c-ae390037ac53/5e8dbd6f-7322-47ca-9085-afe300be25d4/audio.mp3?utm_source=Podcast&in_playlist=7f5a4714-6b10-4ccf-a424-ae390037ac70

It could cure any 'female ailment' - even cancer - said the adverts. But Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound was, in fact, just a concoction of herbs and alcohol of no proven medicinal merit. That didn't stop desperate American women from buying bottles of the stuff - and writing to Lydia Pinkham for medical advice. Why did her customers shun 'expert' doctors and opt instead for quack medicines? And why, when Lydia Pinkham finally came in for criticism, did no one question the efficacy of her vegetable compound? For a full list of sources for this episode, go to timharford.com. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

## Transcript

[0:15] Speaker 1: Pushkin. A fearful tragedy, declared the newspaper, all caps, of
[0:26] Speaker 1: course it was, after all the eighteen eighties. A fearful tragedy.
[0:32] Speaker 1: A clergyman of Stanford, Connecticut, killed by his own wife.
[0:37] Speaker 1: But why? What were the circumstances? Could the tragedy have
[0:41] Speaker 1: been prevented? Never fear The full explanation is forthcoming. But
[0:48] Speaker 1: be warned, this is not actually a news report. It's
[0:52] Speaker 1: an advertisement, apparently based on a true story. A fearful tragedy,
[0:59] Speaker 1: A clergyman of Stratford, Connecticut, killed by his own wife,
[1:03] Speaker 1: insanity brought on by sixteen years of suffering with female complaints.
[1:07] Speaker 1: The cards lydia E. Pinkham's vegetable compound. They're sure cure
[1:11] Speaker 1: for these complaints would have prevented the direful deed. Well, well,
[1:17] Speaker 1: it's quite a tale and quite a claim. Gather around,
[1:21] Speaker 1: ladies and gentlemen, and take a comfortable seat, for I
[1:25] Speaker 1: am about to tell you a tale of direful deeds
[1:28] Speaker 1: are plenty, and of female complaints, and of the most
[1:32] Speaker 1: efficacious vegetable compounds you could wish for. I'm Tim Harford,
[1:38] Speaker 1: and you're listening to cautionary tales. Lydia Estes Pinkham was
[2:12] Speaker 1: born Lydia Estes in the city of Lynn, Massachusetts, in
[2:16] Speaker 1: eighteen nineteen, the tenth child of a modestly wealthy family
[2:21] Speaker 1: of Quakers. If you'd met Lydia as a young woman,
[2:25] Speaker 1: you wouldn't have imagined that she'd get into the business
[2:27] Speaker 1: of herbal treatments for female complaints. She would have seemed
[2:31] Speaker 1: more like a social activist, even an anti racist. Lydia,
[2:36] Speaker 1: her mother, and some of her sisters were among the
[2:39] Speaker 1: founder members of the Lynn Female Antislavery Society. Lydia and
[2:45] Speaker 1: her sister Julie Elma were friends with a great abolitionist activist,
[2:49] Speaker 1: Frederick Douglas. He was about their age and had moved
[2:53] Speaker 1: to Lynn after escaping slavery, and the girls put their
[2:57] Speaker 1: reputation on the line for Frederick Douglas. Lydia stood in
[3:01] Speaker 1: the way of a railroad conductor who was trying to
[3:04] Speaker 1: send Douglas to the car reserved for blacks and irish
[3:09] Speaker 1: the Quaker faith because it wasn't staunch enough in its
[3:12] Speaker 1: demands for the abolition of slavery. Julie Elma created a
[3:16] Speaker 1: scandal after being seen walking arm in arm with Douglas.
[3:20] Speaker 1: She was thrown out of her church when she refused
[3:24] Speaker 1: to rule out marrying a black man. Color would make
[3:28] Speaker 1: no difference to me in a husband. I would look
[3:30] Speaker 1: only upon a man's character. Both Lydia and Julie Elmer
[3:35] Speaker 1: were founding members of a new Debating and Lecture Society.
[3:39] Speaker 1: No person shall be excluded from full participation in any
[3:43] Speaker 1: of the operations of this Society on account of sex, complexion,
[3:47] Speaker 1: or religious or political opinions. Frederick Douglas became the society's
[3:51] Speaker 1: president and Lydia its secretary. A debating society upholding feminism,
[3:58] Speaker 1: anti racism, and religious tolerance. It's quite a start to
[4:02] Speaker 1: a remarkable career. Then came the second stage of Lydia's life,
[4:07] Speaker 1: that of wife and mother. At the age of twenty four,
[4:11] Speaker 1: she married one of her fellow debaters, Isaac Pinkham, a
[4:15] Speaker 1: widower and a gentleman, described by a contemporary as kindly
[4:19] Speaker 1: but of no great vigor. That seems implausible. For one thing,
[4:25] Speaker 1: the Pinkham's had four sons and a daughter. For another,
[4:29] Speaker 1: Isaac's problem seemed less to be lack of vigor, but
[4:33] Speaker 1: restless activity. He had big dreams and questionable business judgment.
[4:39] Speaker 1: Lydia's father had given them a house in the center
[4:42] Speaker 1: of the city that Isaac, always with an eye on
[4:45] Speaker 1: the next prize, sold up and moved the family eight times.
[4:51] Speaker 1: As a career. He tried first shoemaking, then kerosene manufacturing
[4:56] Speaker 1: and produced, training, farming, and building. Lydia's biographer, Sarah Stage
[5:02] Speaker 1: writes that he changed occupations as often as some people
[5:06] Speaker 1: changed clothes. Lydia Pinkham, meanwhile, was trying to keep everything
[5:12] Speaker 1: together at home. Lydia's second son, Daniel, died in infancy
[5:18] Speaker 1: of gastro enteritis. It must have been terribly hard and
[5:22] Speaker 1: all too common in the nineteenth century. She also named
[5:26] Speaker 1: her next baby Daniel. Life had to go on, and
[5:31] Speaker 1: go on it did. One of Lydia's many housewifely chores
[5:35] Speaker 1: was to brew up a vegetable tonic at home. This
[5:39] Speaker 1: wasn't unusual. Home Brewed medicines were ubiquitous since doctors were
[5:43] Speaker 1: expensive and of doubtful help, and disease was an ever
[5:47] Speaker 1: present threat. Lydia Pinkham's tonic was based on an existing formula,
[5:53] Speaker 1: adapted after some kitchen experiments and a close reading of
[5:57] Speaker 1: the American dispensatory, a comprehensive description of herbs and their
[6:02] Speaker 1: medical uses. Her tonic contained a variety of botanical ingredients,
[6:07] Speaker 1: including golden ragwort, unicorn root, fenugreek, butterfly weed, black cohosh,
[6:14] Speaker 1: and alcohol. It was, in her opinion, the finest remedy
[6:19] Speaker 1: of my experience, remedy for what four female complaints? Of course, painful,
[6:27] Speaker 1: irregular or heavy menstruation, a prolapsed uterus, menopausal symptoms, etc. Etc.
[6:34] Speaker 1: Lydia gave away pints of the stuff to her neighbors.
[6:38] Speaker 1: It was only in eighteen seventy five, after Isaac Pinkham's
[6:42] Speaker 1: latest scheme real estate speculation catastrophically failed, that Lydia was
[6:48] Speaker 1: finally tempted into commerce. She was in her mid fifties,
[6:53] Speaker 1: her father was long dead, the family money long spent,
[6:56] Speaker 1: and the Pinkham's desperately needed some cash. The story goes
[7:01] Speaker 1: that two strangers rode up to the Pinkham residence in
[7:05] Speaker 1: a handsome carriage, said they'd come five miles up the
[7:08] Speaker 1: coast from and offered Lydia five dollars for six bottles
[7:13] Speaker 1: of her famous vegetable compound that was easily a week's wages.
[7:19] Speaker 1: And although somewhat embarrassed, Lydia Pinkham accepted the price and
[7:24] Speaker 1: made the sale. It was the start of the third
[7:28] Speaker 1: and most remarkable phase of Lydia Pinkham's life, that of
[7:33] Speaker 1: HeLa entrepreneur and agony aunt, all rolled into one. The
[7:38] Speaker 1: idea first came from her twenty seven year old son Dan, mother,
[7:43] Speaker 1: if those ladies will come all the way from Salem
[7:45] Speaker 1: to get that medicine, why can it not be sold
[7:48] Speaker 1: to other people? Why can't we go into the business
[7:50] Speaker 1: of making it and selling it same as any other medicine.
[7:54] Speaker 1: Lydia Pinkham and her children put Lydia's vegetable compound on
[7:57] Speaker 1: the market, promoting it with matronly images of Lydia E.
[8:02] Speaker 1: Pinkham herself, and promoting the tonic with a four page
[8:06] Speaker 1: pamphlet from which Lydia offered frank health advice buy a
[8:10] Speaker 1: woman for women. Dan Pinkham set out to spread the
[8:14] Speaker 1: word of his mother's miraculous vegetable compound. He paced the
[8:18] Speaker 1: streets of Boston and New York, hustling for sales to
[8:22] Speaker 1: drug stores, going door to door handing out leaflets, haggling
[8:26] Speaker 1: with printers over the cost of printing those leaflets and
[8:29] Speaker 1: writing letters home asking for money for God's sake? Whose
[8:34] Speaker 1: management is it that keeps me from having what I
[8:36] Speaker 1: actually need? Now? In consequence of your cuss judgment, I
[8:40] Speaker 1: shall have to live upon a cracker diet. There is
[8:43] Speaker 1: no use in writing I actually can't spare three cents
[8:46] Speaker 1: to buy a stamp with. Dan's advertising ideas were imaginative
[8:50] Speaker 1: but impractical. He littered New York's parks and graveyards with
[8:55] Speaker 1: little cards with faux handwritten notes on them, giving the
[8:59] Speaker 1: impression that someone had been meaning to post a message
[9:03] Speaker 1: recommending Lydia E. Pinkham's vegetable compound to a friend, but
[9:07] Speaker 1: had dropped the car before it reached the mailbox. Several
[9:12] Speaker 1: thousand times, Dan also fantasized about draping a banner from
[9:18] Speaker 1: one end of the Brooklyn Bridge to the other. His
[9:22] Speaker 1: younger brother, Will was working smarter, not harder. After making
[9:26] Speaker 1: a big sale to the Boston wholesaler Weeks and Potter,
[9:30] Speaker 1: Will Pinkham swung past the offices of the Boston Herald
[9:34] Speaker 1: and asked how much it would cost to put an
[9:37] Speaker 1: advertisement with his mother's picture on the front page. Sixty
[9:42] Speaker 1: dollars came the response. Will Pinkham had eighty four dollars
[9:46] Speaker 1: in his pocket, so he slapped down the cash and
[9:50] Speaker 1: went home to tell his mother what he had done
[9:53] Speaker 1: to her. It was a disastrous echo of her rash
[9:56] Speaker 1: husband's business gambles. That was like a thunderclap out of
[10:00] Speaker 1: a clear sky. And we all sat down and had
[10:03] Speaker 1: a good cry. But within two days order from Boston
[10:10] Speaker 1: drug stores emptied the Pinkham stock of vegetable compound. Stores
[10:14] Speaker 1: which had bought a dozen bottles at a time, now
[10:17] Speaker 1: placed orders for a hundred or more. The lesson was clear.
[10:21] Speaker 1: It pays to advertise, especially if you advertise with the
[10:26] Speaker 1: matronly image of lydia E Pinkham. Lydia E Pinkham's Vegetable
[10:32] Speaker 1: Compound cures female complaints such as dragging sensations, week back,
[10:38] Speaker 1: falling and displacements, inflammation and ulceration, and organic diseases, and
[10:44] Speaker 1: it dissolves and expels tumors at an early stage. Women
[10:48] Speaker 1: suffering from any form of female weakness are invited to
[10:51] Speaker 1: write Missus Pinkham Lynn, Massachusetts for advice. The Pinkham's bought
[10:57] Speaker 1: another front page advert the following week and got much
[11:01] Speaker 1: the same result. As they sank more money into advertising,
[11:05] Speaker 1: sales continued to soar. Missus Pinkham was on her way
[11:09] Speaker 1: to having one of the most famous faces in America.
[11:13] Speaker 1: Hair in a bun, slightly graying neck, concealed by a
[11:17] Speaker 1: starchy ruff, fastened centrally by a simple brooch. She was
[11:21] Speaker 1: the very picture of middle aged respectability and wisdom. Her
[11:26] Speaker 1: vegetable compound would soon become legendary. It's the all American
[11:30] Speaker 1: rags to riches story. But there is one nagging question.
[11:35] Speaker 1: Did the vegetable compound cure anything? The tonic consisted of
[11:40] Speaker 1: a few herbs preserved with a generous splash of booze.
[11:44] Speaker 1: The advertising claimed it was so efficacious for female complaints
[11:49] Speaker 1: that it would prevent menstruating or menopausal women from direfully
[11:53] Speaker 1: murdering their husbands, even that it would prevent cancer. Was
[11:58] Speaker 1: that actually true? It wasn't a question that people seemed
[12:03] Speaker 1: to be interested in asking cautionary tales will return after
[12:10] Speaker 1: the break. Missus Pinkham was not the first entrepreneur to
[12:29] Speaker 1: make money selling unusual concoctions. The wave of enthusiasm for
[12:34] Speaker 1: such remedies had begun before she was born. Oddly, These
[12:38] Speaker 1: remedies were called patent medicines, although no patents were involved. Instead,
[12:44] Speaker 1: entrepreneurs used trademarks to protect their brand image, which is
[12:48] Speaker 1: telling in its own right. This was a world of
[12:51] Speaker 1: style and snake oil over substance, and fakes and quacks prospered.
[12:57] Speaker 1: As a newspaper editor complained as early as eighteen hundred,
[13:00] Speaker 1: the vendors of patent medicines in almost every capital town
[13:04] Speaker 1: in the United States are fattering on the weakness and
[13:07] Speaker 1: folly of a deluded public. One of those vendors was
[13:11] Speaker 1: Thomas Diet, a penniless immigrant from England looking to make
[13:15] Speaker 1: a mark on Philadelphia. By day, he polished shoes. By night,
[13:20] Speaker 1: he manufactured the black shoe polish. He soon had more
[13:24] Speaker 1: shoe polish than he could use. Opened a store, then
[13:27] Speaker 1: a warehouse, then a bottle factory, before finally realizing that
[13:31] Speaker 1: if he was to spend his days putting gloop into
[13:35] Speaker 1: bottles and medicinal gloop would be far more profitable. Even
[13:40] Speaker 1: at the time, there were many critics of such tonics
[13:43] Speaker 1: and potions. They would be dismissed as trumpery, by which
[13:47] Speaker 1: they meant fraud or showy nonsense. It's a good word,
[13:52] Speaker 1: but the critics didn't dampen the vigorous demand, and Thomas
[13:56] Speaker 1: Diet took full advantage. Diet sold a wide variety of cures,
[14:02] Speaker 1: his own concoctions, the popular medicines of his rivals, and
[14:06] Speaker 1: above all treatments perfected by his grandfather, the noted Doctor
[14:11] Speaker 1: Robertson of Edinburgh. Doctor Robertson's vegetable nervous cordial, Doctor Robertson's
[14:17] Speaker 1: gout and rheumatic drops, Doctor Robertson's infallible worm destroying lozenges,
[14:24] Speaker 1: and Doctor Robertson's cure for a certain disease presumably something
[14:29] Speaker 1: or everything involving the male never regions. Diet was proud
[14:35] Speaker 1: of his ancestor, doctor Robertson, despite the fact that the
[14:38] Speaker 1: Philadelphia Medical Journal scathingly explained that there had been no
[14:43] Speaker 1: noted doctor Robertson in Edinburgh for two centuries. No matter,
[14:51] Speaker 1: Thomas Diet was soon claiming to be a physician himself,
[14:54] Speaker 1: and more to the point, by the eighteen thirties he
[14:57] Speaker 1: was enormously wealthy, making the equivalent of ten million dollars
[15:02] Speaker 1: a year. He kept a grand estate and was driven
[15:06] Speaker 1: around in a fine English coach with half a dozen outriders.
[15:11] Speaker 1: He kept expanding his operations, even setting up a bank.
[15:15] Speaker 1: Why was he so successful, certainly because he was a
[15:19] Speaker 1: master of vivid, clever advertising. But was it because his
[15:24] Speaker 1: worm destroying lozenges actually were infallible? Not a chance. And
[15:31] Speaker 1: when Diet's fortunes turned, which they did in eighteen thirty seven,
[15:35] Speaker 1: it wasn't because people stopped buying useless treatments from a
[15:39] Speaker 1: fake doctor with an imaginary grandfather. It was because Diet's
[15:43] Speaker 1: bank collapsed in the midst of a nationwide banking panic.
[15:47] Speaker 1: If he'd stuck to selling the nonexistent doctor Robertson's far
[15:52] Speaker 1: from infallible worm destroying lozenges, he'd have been fine. Why
[15:58] Speaker 1: do people buy treatments without any evidence that they work?
[16:03] Speaker 1: In some ways, it's a timeless question. As Lydia Pinkham
[16:07] Speaker 1: was perfecting her vegetable compound in the eighteen seventies, Western
[16:12] Speaker 1: Egyptologists that just obtained a papyrus which contained detailed accounts
[16:17] Speaker 1: of Egyptian medical practice from fifteen hundred BCE three and
[16:22] Speaker 1: a half thousand years ago, and, as one medical historian explains,
[16:27] Speaker 1: quackery is an ancient tradition these papyri, the oldest proper
[16:33] Speaker 1: medical instructions of our species, contained potions and salves and
[16:38] Speaker 1: drugs whose effectiveness was a fantasy. The first doctors in
[16:43] Speaker 1: the world were frauds. For the next three and a
[16:47] Speaker 1: half thousand years, little changed. Even today, there are plenty
[16:52] Speaker 1: of phony cures, especially when conventional medicine can't help. Quackery
[16:57] Speaker 1: abhores a vacuum. So when the SSARS CoV two virus
[17:02] Speaker 1: was discovered in early twenty twenty and no proven treatment
[17:06] Speaker 1: or vaccine was available for COVID, within weeks people were
[17:10] Speaker 1: on social media recommending special red soap or treatments for malaria,
[17:17] Speaker 1: or even using a USB flash drive as a BioShield.
[17:21] Speaker 1: There's a lot of money to be made by selling
[17:23] Speaker 1: snake oil to the fearful or desperate. But while quackery
[17:29] Speaker 1: began at least three and a half thousand years ago
[17:33] Speaker 1: and continues to the present day, its golden age may
[17:36] Speaker 1: have been the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the age
[17:40] Speaker 1: of doctor Robertson's worm destroying lozenges and Missus lydia E.
[17:45] Speaker 1: Pinkham's vegetable compound. A few years ago, the economist Werner
[17:50] Speaker 1: Truscan published a study of the US market for unproven
[17:55] Speaker 1: concoctions in this golden age. He concluded that even after
[17:59] Speaker 1: adjusting for inflation, people spent more than a hundred times
[18:04] Speaker 1: as much on these dubious patent medicines in nineteen thirty nine,
[18:08] Speaker 1: firmly in the oddern age than they had back in
[18:11] Speaker 1: eighteen ten, when Thomas diet was just starting out. Across
[18:16] Speaker 1: that period, demand for patent medicines grew twenty times faster
[18:21] Speaker 1: than the economy as a whole, and these strange potions
[18:24] Speaker 1: became a major industry in their own right. So why
[18:28] Speaker 1: did people buy them? The simple answer, sometimes they made
[18:32] Speaker 1: people feel better. There are two reasons for that. One
[18:36] Speaker 1: is the placebo effect. People do often benefit simply from
[18:40] Speaker 1: the belief that they're being treated. Many quack medicines included
[18:44] Speaker 1: ingredients such as chili, alcohol, and opium, producing plausible highs, lows,
[18:50] Speaker 1: and tingles. The chili was fine, the opium was a problem.
[18:55] Speaker 1: Parents could and tragically sometimes did, medicate their own children
[18:59] Speaker 1: to death lydia. Pinkham's vegetable compound contained neither chili nor opium.
[19:05] Speaker 1: That it was twenty percent alcohol, making it to drink
[19:09] Speaker 1: as strong as port or sherry. A small glass of that,
[19:13] Speaker 1: and well, you might indeed relax and feel a little
[19:16] Speaker 1: differently about your female complaints. And then there's the fact
[19:21] Speaker 1: that most people who feel bad feel better in due course.
[19:26] Speaker 1: If they're suffering from an infection, the immune system kicks
[19:29] Speaker 1: in period pains pass with each monthly cycle. The symptoms
[19:34] Speaker 1: of menopause usually fade after a few years. And if
[19:38] Speaker 1: you happen to be taking medicine when your sufferings a bait,
[19:42] Speaker 1: well perhaps you'll give the medicine the benefit of the
[19:45] Speaker 1: doubt and tell your friends. There was another reason for
[19:48] Speaker 1: the popularity of patent medicines. People bought them because they
[19:52] Speaker 1: didn't trust the doctors. The doctors of the day had
[19:55] Speaker 1: a habit of prescribing calamel, a compound of mercury, which
[20:00] Speaker 1: was distinctly toxic and caused inflamed gums and ashen complexion
[20:05] Speaker 1: and in extreme cases are rotting away of the or
[20:10] Speaker 1: Women in particular had reason to be wary of doctors.
[20:13] Speaker 1: In the nineteenth century, evidence was slowly emerging that physicians
[20:18] Speaker 1: were accidentally killing their female patients by attending births while
[20:23] Speaker 1: their hands were contaminated from disease from other patients or
[20:27] Speaker 1: from dissecting corpses. The medical profession, however, was outraged at
[20:32] Speaker 1: this suggestion and refused to consider the evidence that it
[20:35] Speaker 1: was true. Charles D. Meegs, an American obstetrician, sputtered that
[20:41] Speaker 1: doctors a gentleman, and gentleman's hands are clean if the
[20:45] Speaker 1: alternative was jaw rotting, calamel, crude surgery, or death from
[20:50] Speaker 1: infection after a doctor prodded your uterus with cadaver juice
[20:54] Speaker 1: under his fingernails, all at vast expense. Well small wonder
[20:59] Speaker 1: that people flocked to the patent medicine cellars, especially those
[21:04] Speaker 1: like Lydia Pinkham, who offered relief for female complaints. It's
[21:09] Speaker 1: hard to read the economist Werna Truskan's research without thinking
[21:13] Speaker 1: not just of the trumpery of patent medicines, but trumpery
[21:18] Speaker 1: of the more political kind. All across the world, left
[21:22] Speaker 1: and particularly right wing populists have been in the ascendancy,
[21:26] Speaker 1: while old fashioned centrists have been out of fashion. The
[21:30] Speaker 1: parallels are inescapable populists, like patent medicine sellers, often suggest
[21:36] Speaker 1: approaches which offer a short term pick me up, even
[21:39] Speaker 1: if they only make things worse over time. Populists like
[21:43] Speaker 1: patent medicine sellers thrive when the establishment has let people down.
[21:48] Speaker 1: The doctors of the nineteenth century talked confidently, but looked
[21:52] Speaker 1: down on their clients and offered their own ineffective remedies.
[21:57] Speaker 1: Are political centrists so different Today? Populists, like patent medicine sellers,
[22:03] Speaker 1: rely on marketing huge adverts, bold claims, attention grabbing stunts.
[22:09] Speaker 1: In the nineteenth century, it was common for quack medicine
[22:13] Speaker 1: sellers to operate alongside a circus. Modern populists try to
[22:17] Speaker 1: generate a circus all of their own, and populists, like
[22:22] Speaker 1: patent medicine sellers, are quick to claim that the people
[22:25] Speaker 1: are on their side. Consider this newspaper editorial from eighteen
[22:30] Speaker 1: eighty one. There is no such thing as medical authority.
[22:35] Speaker 1: The people are and are obliged to be the only
[22:38] Speaker 1: judges of medicine and of physicians. The people are the
[22:43] Speaker 1: only true judges, and the people have had enough of experts.
[22:47] Speaker 1: If people like what's on offer, whether it's tough talk
[22:50] Speaker 1: about immigration or a vegetable compound, well, isn't that all
[22:55] Speaker 1: the proof of effectiveness that anyone would need? It? Was
[22:58] Speaker 1: a tempting claim about patent medicines then, and it's attempting
[23:02] Speaker 1: claim about politics today, because one thing that infuriates people,
[23:07] Speaker 1: whether the reactionary voters of today or the suffering patience
[23:11] Speaker 1: of the nineteenth century, it's feeling that you're not being
[23:14] Speaker 1: listened to by the people who should be looking after you.
[23:18] Speaker 1: Listening to people was something Lydia Pinkham did very well. Indeed,
[23:23] Speaker 1: dear Missus Pinkham, I have been afflicted with a malady
[23:28] Speaker 1: that my physician, frankly tells me that he has never
[23:31] Speaker 1: met with before, and I write to ask you the
[23:34] Speaker 1: cause and what the cure is. It is an affection
[23:38] Speaker 1: of the gums and mucous membrane of the mouth. The
[23:41] Speaker 1: gums turn white and a layer easily rubs off, leaving
[23:45] Speaker 1: them very red and angry. The inside of my cheeks
[23:49] Speaker 1: and corners of my jar are white and look and
[23:52] Speaker 1: feel hot. Such letters to Missus Pinkham were common adverts
[23:57] Speaker 1: for the Pinkham Company actively encouraged suffering women to write
[24:01] Speaker 1: in for advice. No man would ever read their letter,
[24:05] Speaker 1: they were assured. In this case. Lydia Pinkham's response was,
[24:10] Speaker 1: to the point, you have taken virulent poisons in the
[24:13] Speaker 1: form of medicine that has coresed disease of the mucous membranes.
[24:18] Speaker 1: It's the typical response of the quack healer blame mainstream
[24:23] Speaker 1: medicine for the affliction. But given that these symptoms were
[24:26] Speaker 1: typical of calamel poisoning, Pinkham was probably right. Missus Pinkham
[24:32] Speaker 1: recommended instead the dry form of her compound, which was
[24:35] Speaker 1: alcohol free, supplemented by some healthy living Bathe yourself all
[24:41] Speaker 1: over every night in hot water, eat farinaceous food and broths,
[24:45] Speaker 1: ride out and walk out, dig use the trowel, take
[24:49] Speaker 1: the compound according to instructions, and let doctors alone. That
[24:54] Speaker 1: might work, or it might not, but it sounds better
[24:58] Speaker 1: than calamel. Unlike the doctors, Missus Pinkham seemed to be listening,
[25:04] Speaker 1: and she was listening with the benefit of her own experience,
[25:07] Speaker 1: as one of the Pinkham upon his advice books explained,
[25:12] Speaker 1: it takes a woman to understand a woman. Take, for instance,
[25:16] Speaker 1: the long list of diseases and discomforts which come directly
[25:20] Speaker 1: from some derangement of the female generative organs. Do you
[25:25] Speaker 1: think it possible for a man to understand these things.
[25:29] Speaker 1: That still doesn't answer the question of whether Lydia E.
[25:32] Speaker 1: Pinkham's vegetable compound actually worked. But then what did the
[25:37] Speaker 1: doctors have to offer that was better nothing. The Pinkham
[25:42] Speaker 1: Company was set up as a partnership between Lydia Pinkham's
[25:45] Speaker 1: four children, and it remained within the family for decades.
[25:50] Speaker 1: But at the start of the twentieth century, the Pinkham's
[25:53] Speaker 1: became a tempting target for a backlash against patent medicines
[25:57] Speaker 1: in general. In nineteen oh five, Edward Bok, the editor
[26:02] Speaker 1: of The Ladies Home Journal, launched a ferocious attack on
[26:06] Speaker 1: the Pinkham's. He published a discomforting pair of contrasting images.
[26:11] Speaker 1: On the left, her recent advertisement for Lydia Pinkham's vegetable compound,
[26:16] Speaker 1: urging women to write to missus Pinkham for advice. On
[26:21] Speaker 1: the right, a photograph of an ornate monument in a
[26:25] Speaker 1: cemetery in Lynn, Massachusetts, to Lydia E. Pinkham, showing that
[26:32] Speaker 1: she had died on May the seventeenth, eighteen eighty three,
[26:37] Speaker 1: twenty two years earlier. The implication was clear the Pinkham's
[26:44] Speaker 1: were liars. Cautionary tales will return after the break Edward
[27:07] Speaker 1: Box attack was an uncomfortable moment for the Pinkham family business,
[27:11] Speaker 1: which was being run by Lydia's son Charles. They were
[27:15] Speaker 1: encouraging people to write to Missus Pinkham, but Missus Pinkham
[27:19] Speaker 1: had been dead since the early years of the company.
[27:23] Speaker 1: The Pinkham defense was to brazen it out. They issued
[27:27] Speaker 1: a statement noting that the Missus Pinkham mentioned in the
[27:30] Speaker 1: advertisement was Lydia's daughter in lawd Jenny, and she supervised
[27:35] Speaker 1: the company's correspondence with female customers. The company explained that
[27:39] Speaker 1: they had never claimed that Lydia E. Pinkham answered all
[27:42] Speaker 1: the letters, and declared optimistically that the general public understands
[27:47] Speaker 1: this very well. But why were prominent commentators such as
[27:52] Speaker 1: Edward bock so keen to attack the Pinkham operation. Not
[27:57] Speaker 1: because there was any suggestion that the vegetable compound did
[28:00] Speaker 1: not work. Nobody seemed to care about that. Instead, just
[28:05] Speaker 1: as Thomas Diet had been undone, not by selling phony
[28:08] Speaker 1: cures but because of a bank run, campaigners such as
[28:12] Speaker 1: Bok worried less about whether patent medicines helped women, and
[28:16] Speaker 1: more that they contained alcohol. One of Bok's articles was
[28:21] Speaker 1: titled The Patent Medicine Curse. It included a table showing
[28:26] Speaker 1: the alcohol content of Lydia, Pinkham's vegetable compound, and three
[28:30] Speaker 1: dozen other patent medicines. No woman has a moral right
[28:34] Speaker 1: to give a medicine to her child or to any
[28:37] Speaker 1: member of her family, or to take the medicine herself,
[28:39] Speaker 1: the ingredients of which either she does not know or
[28:42] Speaker 1: has not the assurance of a responsible physician to be harmless.
[28:47] Speaker 1: Bok finished with a flourish arguing that to give a
[28:51] Speaker 1: medicine containing alcohol to a child would be to strike
[28:55] Speaker 1: at his very soul, planting the seed of a future drunkard.
[29:01] Speaker 1: As for the women themselves, Bok sneered at their symptoms.
[29:06] Speaker 1: They feel sluggish after the all wind indoor confinement. They
[29:10] Speaker 1: feel that their symptoms need a toning up. The idea
[29:16] Speaker 1: that some women might be suffering agonizing, disabling pain doesn't
[29:21] Speaker 1: seem to have occurred to Edward Boch. But then, despite
[29:25] Speaker 1: the fact that he edited the Ladies home Journal, he
[29:29] Speaker 1: was almost proud to declare, weirdly in the third person
[29:33] Speaker 1: that he knew nothing about them. It is a curious
[29:37] Speaker 1: fact that Edward Bok's instinctive attitude towards women was one
[29:41] Speaker 1: of avoidance. They had never interested him. Of women, therefore
[29:46] Speaker 1: he knew little of their needs less, nor had he
[29:49] Speaker 1: the slightest desire, even as an editor, to know them
[29:52] Speaker 1: better or seek to understand them. Three things, however, he
[29:58] Speaker 1: did understand. First, the medicine contained alcohol. Second, in the
[30:03] Speaker 1: opinion of Edward Bok, women were inventing their symptoms. And third,
[30:08] Speaker 1: the Pinkham come and he was inviting women to write
[30:10] Speaker 1: to Missus Pinkham even though Missus Pinkham was dead. What
[30:14] Speaker 1: more did anyone want? Well, if you were suffering from
[30:20] Speaker 1: female complaints, perhaps a cure. The medical term for one
[30:26] Speaker 1: particular form of female complaint is dysmenorrhea. We usually just
[30:30] Speaker 1: call it period pain, and it can be incapacitating in
[30:34] Speaker 1: its severity. The doctors of the late nineteenth and early
[30:38] Speaker 1: twentieth century didn't have much to offer beyond suggesting that
[30:43] Speaker 1: pregnancy was the natural cure. But surely we can do
[30:46] Speaker 1: better in the twenty first century, can't we. If you
[30:50] Speaker 1: search the medical literature, you won't find many treatments for
[30:54] Speaker 1: severe period pain. Exercise might help a bit. Maybe the
[30:59] Speaker 1: same is true for the contraceptive pill. Anti inflammatories such
[31:03] Speaker 1: as hyberprofen can help, Ginger might help. That's about it,
[31:07] Speaker 1: but intriguingly small study conducted in twenty thirteen reported that
[31:12] Speaker 1: a safe and widely used drug might provide total pain
[31:17] Speaker 1: relief over four consecutive hours for women suffering dysmenorrhea. Before
[31:23] Speaker 1: you rush to get yourself a packet of this miracle drug,
[31:26] Speaker 1: I'm afraid the study wasn't big enough to rely upon.
[31:29] Speaker 1: The researchers ran out of money and they struggled to
[31:32] Speaker 1: get funding. Since you can read more about this in
[31:35] Speaker 1: Caroline Creado Perez's book Invisible Women, she interviewed the lead researcher,
[31:41] Speaker 1: who told her simply that he thought he'd never get
[31:43] Speaker 1: funding for a full trial. So that's annoying. If you're
[31:49] Speaker 1: curious about what this promising little drug is, well, it
[31:52] Speaker 1: was originally tested in nineteen eighty nine as a treatment
[31:56] Speaker 1: for angina. It did not work. However, all of the
[32:00] Speaker 1: trial participants were men, and they reported an intriguing side effect,
[32:07] Speaker 1: magnificent erections, and so the drug syldenophil was repurposed and
[32:12] Speaker 1: put on the market as the wander drug viagra. You
[32:17] Speaker 1: can't help, But wonder that if women had been on
[32:20] Speaker 1: the original trial, we might also have fortuitously discovered that
[32:25] Speaker 1: elusive treatment for severe period pain. As it was, men
[32:30] Speaker 1: got their miracle drug, but women are still waiting. Given
[32:34] Speaker 1: this performance from the medical mainstream, it's really no wonder
[32:38] Speaker 1: that treatments such as Lydia Pinkham's vegetable compound thrive. Whether
[32:47] Speaker 1: the Pinkham's really believed in the power of their own
[32:49] Speaker 1: medicine is unclear. Letters from Lydia's sons Dan and Will
[32:55] Speaker 1: suggest a certain degree of cynicism about that. But Lydia
[33:00] Speaker 1: herself seems to have kept the faith in herbal remedies
[33:04] Speaker 1: when the most testing times came. Here's her diary from
[33:08] Speaker 1: eighteen seventeen nine, not long after the vegetable compound had
[33:12] Speaker 1: become a best selling sensation. Daniel Sick in New York,
[33:17] Speaker 1: recommended to take three of my liver pills, then steep
[33:21] Speaker 1: one half ounce of pleurisy root and bugleweed and one
[33:24] Speaker 1: half ounce of marshmallows, taken one half cup at a time,
[33:28] Speaker 1: three or four times per day. Dan Pinkham Rallied but
[33:34] Speaker 1: only for a time. In October eighteen eighty Dan Pinkham
[33:39] Speaker 1: died stricken by tuberculosis. He was just thirty two. His
[33:45] Speaker 1: brother Will had the same illness and was too sick
[33:48] Speaker 1: to attend Dan's funeral. Will died at the age of
[33:52] Speaker 1: twenty eight just two months later. Lydia Pinkham had lost
[33:57] Speaker 1: three of her sons, Dan, Will, and the infant Daniel,
[34:02] Speaker 1: and in all three cases the cause had been illnesses
[34:05] Speaker 1: which are easily treatable. Today, medicine can make progress. That
[34:11] Speaker 1: progress doesn't come from overconfident doctoring, and it doesn't come
[34:15] Speaker 1: from a herbal tonic cleverly packaged up with some grandmotherly wisdom.
[34:20] Speaker 1: Medical progress requires proper testing of treatments, the tests which
[34:26] Speaker 1: weren't done on Calamel and which still haven't been properly
[34:30] Speaker 1: conducted to see if viagra really can treat severe period pain.
[34:35] Speaker 1: But you don't need scientific tests to make money out
[34:38] Speaker 1: of people who are desperate for relief, and Lydia E.
[34:42] Speaker 1: Pinkham's vegetable compound made plenty. Like the image of her
[34:47] Speaker 1: old friend Frederick Douglas, Lydia's portrait became one of the
[34:51] Speaker 1: most reproduced images in the world. Indeed, when Queen Victoria
[34:57] Speaker 1: died in nineteen oh one newspaper. Editors across America often
[35:02] Speaker 1: lacked a portrait of the monarch, so they decorated their
[35:06] Speaker 1: reports and obituaries with the next thing, a picture of
[35:11] Speaker 1: the late Lydia E. Pinkham. Close enough. If you don't
[35:16] Speaker 1: have the real thing, you'll find something to fill the gap.
[35:42] Speaker 1: The best history of Lydia Pinkham and the business of
[35:45] Speaker 1: women's medicine is Female Complaints by Sarah Stage. For a
[35:50] Speaker 1: full list of our sources, see the show notes at
[35:52] Speaker 1: Tim Harford dot com. Cautionary Tales is written by me
[35:59] Speaker 1: Tim Harford with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Alice Fines
[36:03] Speaker 1: with support from Edith Ruslow. The sound design and original
[36:08] Speaker 1: music is the word work of Pascal Wise. The show
[36:12] Speaker 1: wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg,
[36:15] Speaker 1: Ryan Dilley, Julia Barton, Greta Cohne, Little Millard, John schnars
[36:20] Speaker 1: Kylie Migliori, Eric Sandler, Maggie Taylor, Nicole Morano, and Morgan Ratner.
[36:27] Speaker 1: Cautionary Tales here's a production of Pushkin Industries. If you
[36:31] Speaker 1: like the show, please remember to share, rate, and review.
[36:34] Speaker 1: It helps us for mysterious reasons and If you want
[36:38] Speaker 1: to hear the show, add free sign up for Pushkin
[36:41] Speaker 1: Plus on the show page and Apple Podcasts, or at
[36:44] Speaker 1: pushkin dot fm, slash plus

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