Cultures of Consumption
Working Paper Series
Commodifying Lydia Pinkham: A Woman, A Medicine, and A
Company in a Developing Consumer Culture
Susan Strasser, Department of History, University of Delaware
Nothing in this paper may be cited, quoted or summarised or reproduced without permission of
the author(s)
Cultures of Consumption, and ESRC-AHRC Research Programme
Birkbeck College, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HX
Tel: + 44 (0) 20 7079 0601
Fax: + 44 (0) 20 7079 0602
www.consume.bbk.ac.uk
Date: April 2007
Working Paper No. 32
COMMODIFYING LYDIA PINKHAM:
A WOMAN, A MEDICINE, AND A COMPANY IN A DEVELOPING CONSUMER
CULTURE 1
Daniel Rogers Pinkham spent the late spring and summer of 1876 in Brooklyn, literally
wearing out his shoes while handing out hundreds of thousands of pamphlets advertising his
mother’s proprietary medicine, Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound. His many letters to
his Lynn, Massachusetts family offered a steady stream of marketing ideas. “If we should . . .
have our Trade mark picture some New England Scenery with a humble cottage,” he suggested
one Thursday, “these folks would consider it home-made & rush for it as they seem to be all tore
out on home made goods...”2
In fact, as Dan knew well, the medicine was not yet far from home-made. The company
had only been in business for about a year; Lydia still did the manufacturing in her kitchen,
where she had long made medicine for friends and acquaintances, and she would not move to
larger quarters for another two years.3 Dan himself knew how to prepare the Compound. “I’d
buy some herbs & alcohol & make some medicine my self & not wait for you to send any if I
had money enough,” he wrote in exasperation when his brother Will ignored repeated requests to
send medicine he could give away as samples.4
Daniel Pinkham worked constantly -- handing out pamphlets; inquiring about New York
prices on herbs, printers’ supplies, and billboard posting; and visiting druggists to develop retail
outlets. Although he was occasionally down about the company’s prospects, most of his letters
convey the endless optimism of the born salesman. It didn’t hurt that people he met “think we
are going to make piles of money out of it ... It beats all, that everybody should say we are going
to make a fortune, they seem to believe it too.”5
The company did make a fortune, though Dan wore himself out as well as his shoes, and
did not live to enjoy the money. Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound became the leading
proprietary for menstrual and menopausal symptoms, and one of the most popular medicines in
the world. The business that Mrs. Pinkham and her sons founded in 1875 eventually ran
factories in Canada, Mexico, Spain, and France as well as in Lynn, manufacturing a number of
medicines that it sold in many countries over many decades. The family controlled the company
until 1968. A proprietary called Lydia Pinkham Herbal Compound is still on the market, but the
seven herbs in the current formula include only two of the original five.6
The company and the medicine provide an ideal example of commodification in a
developing mass consumer culture. Before her children made money by selling her formula
worldwide, Lydia Pinkham actually did give her remedy away and occasionally sold small
amounts. For students of consumption, this commodification of the private formula of a local
healer sheds light on a fundamental transition in the roles of and relationships between producers
and consumers. In calling on the images of the humble cottage and the New England scenery,
Dan Pinkham wanted to appeal to people’s nostalgia for a disappearing world: as economic
development began to pick up following the depression of the 1870s, the home made and the
handmade were yielding to goods produced in factories by distant companies. During the years
of the company’s greatest success – from its founding in 1875 to its peak in the 1920s -- this
transition was still in progress.7 Despite the old-fashioned manufacturing and financial practices
the firm initially used, it prospered, selling an inherently intimate product with a representation
of an old-fashioned wise woman, who became a new form of commercial celebrity.
The story goes that the family was desperate due to the massive depression that followed
the financial panic of 1873. Lydia’s husband’s real estate holdings had been foreclosed, Dan’s
short-lived grocery store had failed, and his brothers had taken low-status jobs. As the Lynn
Item told it two decades later, the Pinkhams were gathered in the kitchen one day in 1875 when
some women from Salem (about five miles away) came to buy a few bottles of Lydia’s
medicine. “An idea struck one of the boys” – most historians assume Dan, given his potential as
a marketing genius. “Mother,” he said, “if those ladies will come all the way from Salem to get
that medicine, ... why can’t we go into the business of making and selling it, same as any other
medicine?”8 Over the next year, the family created that business. Lydia made the Compound,
wrote the pamphlet that served as the first ad copy, and answered letters from women and their
husbands seeking medical advice. Dan and Will distributed hundreds of thousands of pamphlets
door-to-door in the Boston area, before Dan set off to conquer the New York market. Within
three years, the company was able to rely on newspaper and billboard advertising instead of the
family’s shoe leather.
The notion that the idea of selling the Compound was conceived at a family gathering in
the kitchen, where Lydia made medicine, was part of a heritage of myth-making that began
during the company’s early years. The kitchen – and the commodification process it represented
– always made it into the tale. “Send me that story about making in kitchen &c,” advertising
agent Harlan Page Hubbard requested of Will six years into the firm’s history. “I want to make
sketch for book.”9 A decade later, after he and the Pinkhams had parted company, Hubbard
wrote “The Story of Lydia Pinkham” for the advertising journal Fame. His article incorporated
“that story about making in kitchen,” emphasized the transition from gift to commodity, and used
some phrases that would be echoed in the Lynn Item article, published the next year. Lydia,
wrote Hubbard, “had taken pleasure in manufacturing this compound and giving it free to
sufferers whenever she heard of them.” After the financial crash, Dan and Will asked why she
couldn’t “put this medicine up and sell it on the market like any other medicinal preparation?’
After due consideration this plan was adopted, Mrs. Pinkham for several years making it over the
kitchen stove.”10 An etching produced for company use in 1925 suggests that the Pinkhams
continued to push this image for decades. “When Lydia Pinkham first began making the
medicine,” reads the caption, “her equipment was such as might have been found at the time in
almost any New England kitchen.”11 The image, however, shows not a typical kitchen of 1875,
but the signs of the twentieth-century colonial revival: a braided rug, a ladder-back chair, a
massive fireplace fitted out with cranes and hooks. It transforms Lydia Pinkham into an ersatz
colonial dame, using tools that she would not have used, since by her time cast iron stoves had
become ubiquitous.12
For the historian hoping to cut through the mythology, Dan’s Brooklyn letters – surely
the most vivid of the early extant documents – describe the hard work of one of the founders of
this company, and suggest the dedication of the others. Given the Pinkhams’ eventual success
and the rapid dissemination of the brand name and trademark image of Lydia, the letters help to
foster the notion that determination, pluck, and hard work – along with extraordinary numbers of
advertisements – can sell anything and smooth the course of commodification. But consumers
can not simply be duped, and new products fail more often than they succeed; the twentiethcentury lessons of the Edsel and New Coke suggest that they sometimes fail despite extensive
and expensive advertising campaigns. Herbal medicines are easy to make; this was an enterprise
with low barriers to entry. And any historian who has worked even casually with nineteenthcentury periodicals can testify to the many advertised remedies we have never heard of.
The Pinkhams did succeed. By the time Lydia Pinkham died, eight years after she and
her sons went into business, her medicines had been transformed from homemade remedies into
globally distributed factory-manufactured commodities and her face and name were well known.
Operating in a transitional period, they combined old-fashioned business practices with new
marketing techniques. During the very first years, the company expanded the scope of their
business in every respect – sourcing materials from farther afield, enlarging manufacturing
capacity, and advertising in more distant venues. Depending on close connections to reputable
wholesale drug firms, they produced a standardized medicine despite the idiosyncratic qualities
of the plant materials from which it was made. Their innovative company image united a
powerful representation of the old-fashioned social relations of the traditional herbalist with a
modern variant. Consumers encountered enormous amounts of advertising, some of it making
hyperbolic claims. The pitch was tied not only to that product – which probably did offer at least
as much relief from menstrual cramps and hot flashes as anything else on the market -- but to
opportunities for women to relate to a commercial character they might trust.
Herbal healing for women’s complaints
Before aspirin, long before artificial hormones, and when bathtubs were a luxury, there
were few choices besides herbal medicine for dealing with the common discomforts of women’s
reproductive lives.13 Physicians of all schools used herbs; some doctors specialized in and
confined their prescriptions to botanical remedies. Local herbalists and other lay healers
prescribed and dispensed herbal medicine, and many kitchen gardens included plants that might
bring some relief.
Proprietary or “patent” medicines that combined a number of herbs were widely
available. (Most historians use the terms “proprietary” and “patent” medicine interchangeably,
although “patent medicine” was almost always a misnomer, since a patent application would
require a manufacturer to reveal the formula.) Prescriptions were not legally required for any
drugs until 1914, and the line between nineteenth-century proprietaries and physician-prescribed
medicines was by no means clear. From the consumer’s standpoint, proprietary medicines were
formulated with the same plants, minerals, and solvents that physicians used. Indeed, many
physicians prescribed proprietaries. Although the AMA adopted resolutions against secret
formulas at nearly every annual convention, medical journals not only carried ads for patent
medicines, but used public relations material from the proprietaries as editorial matter.14
Like purchasers of Midol, aspirin, and vitamin C, many women who bought Lydia
Pinkham’s were looking for relief from everyday ailments that they did not consider
consequential enough to merit a doctor’s attention. And like people looking for relief today, they
may have bought a first bottle because they bought the advertising, but if they came back for a
second, they probably thought it had done some good. Nineteenth and early twentieth-century
Americans diagnosed and dosed themselves for minor afflictions in many of the same ways we
do now. They cleaned and bandaged small wounds, and treated themselves for upper respiratory
symptoms. Some Americans relied on proprietaries because they lived far from medical
professionals; some regarded physicians with skepticism, thanks at least in part to such “heroic”
practices as bloodletting and the use of mercury. Many more considered physicians prohibitively
expensive. Caregivers and patients were not necessarily fooled by exaggerated claims; perhaps
nothing they could buy would actually effect a cure, but some proprietary might make a patient
more comfortable at far less expense than a doctor’s visit, and nationally advertised medicines
might well be regarded as more modern than folk remedies.
In her life before commodification, Lydia Pinkham seems to have been one of those local
healers, without medical training but with detailed knowledge of medicinal plants, who were
essential to all kinds of communities well into the twentieth century. Some were skilled
midwives, like Martha Ballard, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century practitioner well
known to historians from Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale.15 Others were known to
their neighbors as botanical pharmacists. Sharla M. Fett argues that southern plantation slave
quarters “harbored many botanical experts.... A former slave from Maryland recalled, ‘The old
people could read the woods just like a book. Whenever you were sick, they could go out and
pick something, and you’d get well.’” One South Carolina planter’s son recalled Eliza Nelson, a
slave who roamed the woods digging up roots, and returned home to make medicine that had a
reputation among whites as well as blacks.16 Sarah Orne Jewett offered a fictional version of a
local healer approximately contemporary to Lydia Pinkham in Almira Todd, the “learned
herbalist” described in The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896). Mrs. Todd grows herbs in her
garden and gathers wild ones; she brews “humble compounds ... in a small caldron on [her]
kitchen stove.” Herself the daughter of a Maine country physician, Jewett described Mrs. Todd
as being “upon the best of terms” with the village doctor, who discussed cases with her though
he did not always believe in her remedies.17
Such local herbalists relied on empirical knowledge. Some certainly had more and others
less knowledge of anatomy and physiology; Martha Ballard attended autopsies, along with other
midwives and with doctors. Similarly, an individual might have more or less knowledge of
botany or pharmacy. But – with whatever degree of sophistication about both plants and patients
– they all did what seemed to work. “There was no quackery about this,” writes one of Lydia
Pinkham’s popular biographers, “any more than there was about Mrs. Pinkham. It was the result
of earnest, if somewhat individualistic and uncontrolled, experiment.”18 As medical historian
Charles Rosenberg explains, “drugs were not ordinarily viewed as specifics for particular disease
entities; materia medica texts were generally arranged not by drug or disease, but in categories
reflecting the drug’s physiological effects: diuretics, cathartics, narcotics, emetics,
diaphoretics.”19 Lay healers knew how to use these qualities to counteract symptoms, and also
how to employ them according to some of the theories then common among physicians,
especially by using plants to empty the digestive tract at both ends.
Some versions of the Lydia Pinkham story assert that a Lynn machinist named George
Clarkson Todd gave Lydia’s husband Isaac the recipe as partial payment for a debt.20 There are
no documents to support this claim, but if it is true, Pinkham probably accepted this deal because
his wife was already actively interested in herbal medicine. Her grandson Arthur, who was too
young to remember her, wrote down impressions learned from his mother. Lydia was “capable,
resourceful, understanding and kind,” a former school teacher frequently called on to nurse
neighbors. “People respected her judgment and opinions regarding their health and had faith in
her methods of nursing them.”21 She had inherited many recipes for home remedies, and found
others in books. A medical notebook that survives from the early years indicates that Lydia had
considerable experience with many herbs besides those in the Compound; in these pages of case
histories and remedy ideas, she mentions dozens of barks, roots, leaves, flowers, seeds, and
resins, as well as such non-herbal ingredients as borax, alum, and cream of tartar.22 Besides the
famous Vegetable Compound, she formulated – and, throughout its history, the Pinkham
company produced – a number of other remedies including a blood purifier, liver pills, and a
douche.
In going into business with her sons, Lydia Pinkham allowed them to commodify her
image, lending authenticity to the product. Although she continued to do the manufacturing for
the first few years, she appears to have relinquished control of the medicine’s image as well as of
her own. Despite her positive personal qualities and her Quaker background, her medical
notebook offers no indication that she had any scruples about postal diagnosis, prescribing for
patients she would never see. And while her evident herbal knowledge suggests that initially she
may have resisted Dan’s idea that the market should be enlarged to include men by advertising
the Compound for kidney problems, advertisements before she died did proclaim, “For the cure
of Kidney Complaints of either sex this Compound is unsurpassed.”23
Some of the advertising – especially during the earliest years of the company –
emphasized dire medical problems. Lydia Pinkham herself did not regard the Vegetable
Compound as a cure-all for severe complaints. When women wrote to her with serious issues,
she usually prescribed it along with other remedies – single herbs, her own packaged products,
and occasionally other companies’ proprietary medicines. But once she gave the advertising
over to her sons and their agents, the medicine was generally promoted not only for painful
menstruation and menopausal symptoms, but for prolapsed uterus, then a common diagnosis
thanks to what one medical historian describes as a “mechanical theory of uterine pathology,”
and treated with an assortment of mechanical devices.24 Despite one historian’s claims, there is
little evidence that women bought the Vegetable Compound as an abortifacient or a
contraceptive; indeed, during the twentieth century the medicine was for some time known for its
slogan, “There’s a Baby in Every Bottle.”25
There is no doubt that the Pinkhams were guilty of exaggerated claims of all kinds. But
the many women who wrote to Lydia Pinkham describing the symptoms of grave illness –
whether they corresponded with the real Lydia or, after her death, the imagined one the company
created – represented only a fraction of the market for a medicine that addressed common
“female complaints,” the market this medicine captured. Moreover, an analysis of the
Compound’s popularity that rests on an understanding of the medicine’s composition, on the
options available to its devotees, on the sheer volume of advertising, and on advertising imagery
rather than on its verbal content, need not construe women looking for relief from menstrual
cramps and hot flashes simply as dupes of commercial messages.26
Making the Medicine
However it was advertised, the formula contained plants that were well known as
women’s herbs. The original recipe can be found in an easily decipherable notation in Lydia’s
handwriting, in her medical notebook between a remedy for dyspepsia and a comment about a
South Boston woman, for whose swollen bowels Lydia had recommended one of her favorite
remedies, wine of apocynum, in addition to the Compound. The note reads: “12 F.G.
[fenugreek], 8 U.R, [unicorn root], 6 L.R. [life root], 6 P.R. [pleurisy root], 6 B.C. [black
cohosh],”27
Some writers surmise that Lydia Pinkham adapted her formula from John King’s
American Dispensatory, although King did not recommend fenugreek, the most unusual and
most abundant ingredient in the Compound. King was professor of obstetrics at the Eclectic
Medical Institute of Cincinnati, the leading institution of the Eclectic school of botanical
medicine; the 8th (1870) edition of his Dispensatory was the standard authority on plant-based
remedies.28 Lydia Pinkham apparently owned and annotated a tenth edition, published in 1876 –
but that was the year after the Vegetable Compound was first marketed.29 She may have
consulted an earlier edition, but she might also have found most of the ingredients described as
women’s remedies in other well-known mid-century medical books that went through multiple
editions, such as The Dispensatory of the U.S.A. by Dr. George B. Wood and Dr. Franklin
Bache, or The Physiomedical Dispensatory by William Cook, MD.
Black cohosh (cimicifuga racemosa) is now the most commonly used of the Compound
formula’s plants, and the one most studied by modern researchers.30 Also called bugbane, black
snakeroot, and macrotys racemosa, it is an American native, at one time abundant east of the
Mississippi, and still common enough in West Virginia to be harvested for sale.31 It was
described by writers of important botanical and herbal texts of the eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries, including Johann David Schöpf (1787), Benjamin Smith Barton (1803), and
Peter Smith (1812); Barton mentioned its use by Indians, calling it squawroot. When the United
States Pharmacopoeia was established in 1820, black cohosh was one of the 217 “most fully
established and best understood” drugs that met its criteria for inclusion.32 John Uri Lloyd, the
most important manufacturing pharmacist for the Eclectic physicians, described it as “a very
sheet-anchor with physicians who understand the uses of the American materia medica. Its
employment was inherited from the American Indians, from whom it came into domestic
medicine, and thence was carried to the profession.”33 John King is credited with promoting it to
physicians.34
Life root, Senecio, (usually Senecio aureus or Senecio gracilis), is another indigenous
American plant that grows in wet places throughout the northern and western states; one of its
many common names is “squaw weed.”35 According to one mid-nineteenth century source, the
English colonists, familiar with a European senecio, used the American species as a female tonic
“from the earliest settlements.”36 John Scudder, who taught obstetrics at the Eclectic Medical
Institute after King, asserted that senecio strengthens and relieves irritation in women’s
reproductive organs. He warned that “the remedy acts slowly, and sufficient time must be
given,” a quality that perhaps rewarded many women’s long-term use of the Compound.37
Senecio is still used among modern herbalists. One well-known writer recommends it for
leucorrhoea,38 a name for a condition that Pinkham literature and advertising called “the whites”;
American women now usually attribute this common white discharge to yeast or vaginal
infection.39
Two different plants are called unicorn root: Aletris farinosa and Chamaelirium luteum
(the latter also called Helonias dioica, or Helonias lutea). Various sources call them both “false”
and “true” unicorn, and they were generally confused with each other in nineteenth century trade.
The Pinkham company, in its early years, always ordered by common names, and Lydia’s
version of the formula offers no hint of which unicorn she used, or if she knew the difference.
At some point the company decided to split the difference and use equal parts of aletris and
chamaelirium.40 They do not, however, have equal standing as women’s tonics; John Scudder,
writing in 1870, described Aletris farinosa as a digestive herb, though he thought it “deserving a
thorough examination” as a uterine tonic. Twenty-eight years later, Harvey Wickes Felter and
John Uri Lloyd’s revision of King’s American Dispensatory asserted that the confusion between
the two plants created “erroneous statements” regarding aletris in female complaints. “Strange
as it may seem,” they wrote, “the two roots have no resemblance [and] are utterly unlike.” Still,
misidentification was so common that Prof. King himself confused the two, in at least one
edition of the book that Lydia Pinkham used.41
Assuming the correct unicorn root, then, three of the Compound’s five herbs were well
known American remedies for women’s ailments. Pleurisy root, Asclepius tuberosa, was the
only plant ingredient in the Compound with no tradition as a women’s herb. In addition to the
respiratory uses implied in its common name, it is best known as a diaphoretic, increasing
perspiration.42 Fenugreek, Foenum graceum, does not appear in mid-nineteenth century
American herbal medical textbooks, and there is no way of knowing where Lydia Pinkham got
the idea for it. But the seeds have been used for millennia in Greece, India, and the Middle East;
in Egypt its use for inducing childbirth was recorded about 1500 BCE. Traditional Indian
Ayurvedic medicine prescribes it for stimulating lactation; Yemenite and North African folk
medicine employs it to induce contractions and modify vaginal secretions during labor; Chinese
medicine uses it for menstrual pain and cervical cancer.43 Its use continues: one Ayurvedic
website recommends it as a treatment for leucorrhoea – again, an ailment for which the
Compound was advertised.44 Fenugreek adds a distinctive flavor to Indian food, and – as the
Vegetable Compound’s largest ingredient – must have flavored it as well.
The five herbs were kept in two-gallon stone jars for a week or two, macerating in
alcohol and water. The alcohol extracted medicinal constituents from the plants and preserved
them; it is an “indispensable and irreplaceable” solvent in pharmacy.45 Alcohol solutions of
plant materials do not ferment, as water-based teas and infusions do, and alcohol extraction
excludes undesirable gums, mucilage, and mineral salts. Notwithstanding the scorn of critics
including Ladies’ Home Journal editor Edward Bok and historian James Harvey Young, most
regular users of the Compound probably did not drink it as a substitute for wine or whiskey, nor
does the 18 percent alcohol content explain why they bought it. The medicine was meant to be
taken by the spoonful; imbibing it would have been expensive and probably unpleasant.
After maceration, the herbs and alcohol were transferred to two- and four-gallon
percolators. As the business grew, wrote Arthur Pinkham, “it meant hundreds of small jars and a
large battery of small percolators;” the first extant inventory, from 1883, includes “127 Jars in
soak” and twenty-three percolators.46 In other words, Lydia and her sons at first expanded
manufacturing capacity by multiplying small-scale methods and equipment rather than by
developing large-scale apparatus and techniques for mass production. Whether by design or by
luck, this gave them flexibility in responding to market conditions – for example, when a
decision to cut back on advertising reduced sales.
Creating a Standard Product
Historians of advertising have discussed proprietary medicine makers as the most
important clients of nineteenth-century advertising agencies. Intense competition and the
development of transcontinental and international markets motivated these energetic
entrepreneurs to develop new marketing techniques, selling goods in branded, consumer-sized
packaging rather than using traditional generic, bulk merchandising methods. Proprietary
medicine makers like the Pinkhams had to argue for the unique merits of their remedies, and
their innovative advertising was intended to associate their products with their claims in
consumers’ minds by means of trade names, emblems, and symbols for reassurance or potency.47
The marketing of branded products rested on establishing new, direct relationships between
manufacturers and consumers and on developing a new kind of product, consisting of the object,
its packaging, and its branded image. But manufacturers hoping to use those techniques faced a
fundamental production challenge. For the brand to serve that relationship, every bottle of Lydia
Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound – like every bar of Ivory soap – had to be essentially identical
to every other one, so that consumers who liked them and came back for more would be satisfied
that they had gotten the same product. It was easier said than done.
All manufacturers contended with human error and bad equipment, not necessarily their
own. The Salem Glass Works at one point sent the Pinkhams a mixed load of Compound bottles
and Blood Purifier bottles, because a manager had given the wrong molds to the workers. “Will
it hurt any body to take the Blood Purifier, when they should have taken the Compound?” asked
the Salem Glass representative, offering to pay a boy to sort the bottles. “I wait with breathless
anxiety your response.”48 S.W. Gould, a wholesaler in nearby Malden from whom the Pinkhams
bought hundreds of pounds of herbs at a time, apologized on a receipt for his bad scales. “I am
very sorry that we cannot weigh the goods right,” he wrote. “[W]ill send my scales to Boston &
have them reset I do not want to wrong you out of 1 lb of goods and it looks bad in ones
billing...”49
Manufacturers of botanical medicine had the additional challenge of reconciling
consumer demand for standard goods with the idiosyncratic qualities of plants and the
vicissitudes of the supply chain. Roots and leaves might be misidentified, and plants that were
easy to find or dig might be substituted for rare or labor-intensive ones. Black cohosh was
sometimes mixed with red cohosh (Actaea rubra), which looked similar.50 But the biggest
identification problem for the Pinkham company was the confusion over the two plants called
unicorn root. “The roots have been thrown upon the market indiscriminately,” commented
William Henry Cook, one of the founders of the Physio-Medical movement, in 1869.51 By 1898,
most of the commercial trade in Aletris was actually Chamaelirium. John Uri Lloyd and Harvey
Wickes Felter used this example to campaign for the use of Latin binomials in the drug trade.
“When ordered by their common names, the roots from one section of the country will be the
reverse of those from other sections,” they wrote, “and when stargrass or unicorn root is sold to a
druggist the dealer is uncertain as to whether it will not be returned as ‘different from that
previously purchased.’ Strict conformity to botanical names will assist in overcoming this
extended and serious evil."52 Aletris farinosa and Chamaelirium luteum were confused in the
trade at least as late as 1919.53
Assuming that the plant received was the plant ordered, its quality and its qualities
depended on its growing conditions: soil, rainfall and temperature; latitude and altitude; and
whether it was wild or cultivated. Like tomatoes or coffee, different samples of medicinal herbs
of the same species and variety could look, taste, and smell different, and have different
proportions of the many active chemicals.54 “This Life Rt is perfect,” exulted S.W. Gould, the
Malden wholesaler, on a Pinkham receipt.55 But perfection could never be counted on; plant
materials were inevitably variable.
Much of the Pinkhams’ raw material – especially the black cohosh and unicorn root –
probably came from the southern Appalachians. Domestic trade in medicinal plants, disrupted
by the Civil War, was reviving around the time the family went into business. Western North
Carolina was the center of the industry; about three-quarters of the medicinal plants in American
trade came from Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Virginia. Small farmers and
mountain people, usually women and children, dug up wild plants in the woods (often on land
they did not own); men usually brought them to the general store, which bought herbs for cash or
exchanged them for manufactured goods.56
Though few depended solely on this trade for a living, many rural people collected and
sold small quantities of crude drugs well into the twentieth century.57 As late as 1940, the
Pinkhams considered encouraging trade in viburnum opulus (high bush cranberry or cramp bark,
by then an ingredient in the Compound). From family vacations, they knew it to be growing in
Aroostook County, Maine, where Charles H. Pinkham recommended contacting general store
owners. “They know everyone in town and can act as agents....The farms are rundown. . . .
These people are busy during the potato season; the rest of the year they depend on hunting,
fishing and trapping. Much business is done by barter at the general store. The Natives would
probably welcome the opportunity to gather bark and exchange it at the store for food and
clothes.”58
In the better established trade of the Appalachians, storekeepers traded plant material to
local wholesalers, often the same wholesale merchants who brought them tea kettles and
molasses to sell.59 The scrupulous and extensive records of one such wholesaler provide
suggestive evidence about collecting and shipping practices in the cash-scarce areas where plant
medicines grew wild, and about the suppliers of the wholesale druggists from whom the
Pinkhams bought herbs. Calvin Cowles of Wilkes County, North Carolina, was active in the
trade during the 1850s, but his practices differed little from those pursued into the twentieth
century. Cowles bought crude drugs from nearby general stores and shipped them to the urban
wholesale drug firms that supplied pharmacies in the North and West; some of his biggest and
most successful customers later supplied the Lydia Pinkham company. “We doubtless do a
larger Botanic business than any house south of the Potomac,” he boasted early in his career.60
He sent samples of plants he wanted to country store keepers, reminding them that he also
carried manufactured products for them to sell.61 At his own store, he let customers settle their
accounts with ginseng.62 People came in with eggs and sassafras and furs, and left with cotton
yarn, cups and saucers, knives and forks.63 Some brought him hundreds of pounds of plant
material.64
Harvesting methods affected quality: the season when roots were dug, the ripeness of
berries, the gathering methods. Cowles’s customers taught him what they wanted. “The Cotton
Root is important to collect before the cotton is fully ripe,” wrote a Saint Louis druggist, a steady
customer.65 A Baltimore customer complained, “The Sample of Pleurisy Root you have sent me
at this time ... was obtained in the wrong Season, it is ... not plump and full as it will be when got
in the right season, now [September] is the right time when the sap is down.”66 J.C. Ayer &
Company of Lowell, Massachusetts – manufacturers of several proprietary medicines – wrote to
say that they were sorry not to get the styllingia they had depended on, “but it is too late to gather
it now.”67 Eventually Cowles learned to offer, for example, “After frost Ginseng,”68 and he
shipped different herbs as they each came into season.69 But even the most expert local
wholesaler had to depend on less knowledgeable or less scrupulous sources. Part-time collectors
went into the woods during slack times in their other labor, and “convenience rather than the
Pharmacopoeia governs the season,”70 complained the Journal of the American Pharmaceutical
Association in 1919.
Local wholesalers like Cowles dried plants, sorted them to remove refuse, and put them
into sacks or pressed them into bales for storage and shipment. “Different flowers require
different treatment,” the JAPA explained: “elder flowers are dried in a day in the sun, while red
clover requires shade, and a curing period of a month or more.” Badly dried or prematurely
baled plants could ferment or mold; even the best care might not prevent insect attacks.71
Cowles sometimes signed agreements that specified that plant material “be thoroughly clean and
dry and free from mould,” or received orders specifying that it be “well cured.”72
Unfortunately for Cowles and the local wholesalers who followed him, good quality
herbs could be damaged in shipment. Mold was perhaps the most frequent customer
complaint.73 The Henry Thayer company of Cambridgeport, Massachusetts – one of the first
manufacturing pharmacist firms that the Lydia Pinkham company did business with74 – objected
to mold and much else. “The yellow dock in addition to its natural poor quality, is one mass of
Mould, and we can do nothing with it...The sample of Scullcap does not compare with what we
have used, and appears destitute of the very principles we want.”75
In sourcing crude drugs for their manufacturing and retailing customers, then, the urban
wholesale druggists protected quality. In addition, they processed medicine. For many years,
the Pinkhams had the wholesale firms do their herb grinding rather than investing in the
equipment to do it themselves. Henry Thayer, the Cambridgeport wholesale druggist from
whom they had been buying herbs from the very start, actually prepared many of their products –
especially those in pill and lozenge form.76 Relying on the knowledge and facilities of the urban
wholesale drug firms, the Pinkhams were able to market products sufficiently standardized to
satisfy consumers. I found no complaints about product quality in the archives, other than letters
suggesting that the medicine did not work for somebody’s particular problem. More to the point,
consumers continued to buy the product.
A Symbol and a System
To convince women to buy their medicines, the Pinkham company created both a symbol
of the old-fashioned local herbalist and a modern version of her social relations. As
anthropologist Cristina Grasseni observes in a study of traditional Italian cheesemakers
accommodating to a market regulated by the European Union, commodification entails both the
product and the marketing; she writes that the processes of commodification and of
representation converge.77 The Pinkhams developed a twofold representation. Their trademark
image of Lydia Pinkham communicated authenticity, while a consultation system filled the niche
of the traditional herbalist. Consumers were invited to write for advice: women who could not
afford doctors’ visits, women whose doctors and other healers had not brought them relief, and
women too embarrassed to seek intimate advice face to face.
Proprietary medicine manufacturers had to establish authenticity as they began to operate
in the realm of advertising and sponsorship, a realm that blurred the line between truth and
fiction.78 During the transition period that coincided with the company’s success, marketers had
to assure people accustomed to homemade and handmade goods that they could trust products
created in distant factories. To potential customers of proprietary remedies, trustworthiness was
as central as it was for people considering factory-made food. Most people used medicine
prepared by the local healers who gave them medical advice and treatment – including regular
physicians, who generally dispensed medicine rather than relying on pharmacists.
The trademark portraits of Lydia Pinkham – the first appeared in 1879 – proved
particularly effective. They depicted a mature woman, associating the product with traditional
wisdom. And they offered the consumer a portrait of the entrepreneur, suggesting that despite
factory production, trade relationships might still be personal. Lydia Pinkham was thus an early
example or two types of reassurance, each used also by many other companies. Trade cards for
the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, for example, showed a grandmother in a cap
drinking tea; “take Grandmother’s advice,” read the copy, and use A&P products.79 In the
Pinkham trademark, this sage character merged with the guarantee implied by a picture of the
entrepreneur, a strategy used for other products such as Smith Brothers cough drops and Gillette
razors.80
Advertising agent Hubbard claimed that he had originated the portrait as a “striking and
unique” way to replace the earliest advertising’s sensational “scare heads,” which trumpeted the
horrors of illnesses supposedly curable by the Compound. (“Thousands Dying Annually From
Causes to the World Unknown,” read one, while another blamed a Connecticut clergyman’s
murder on his wife’s “insanity brought on by 16 years of suffering with female complaints.”81)
“In a happy moment,” Hubbard wrote, “I conceived the idea that [Lydia’s] motherly looking face
put at the head of the advertisement would make it remarkably attractive. After some persuasion
I obtained permission to use it.” Hubbard also took credit for adding Lydia’s signature with the
line “yours for health” -- another representation of authenticity – although her signature actually
appeared on wrappers for lozenges even before the portrait.82 Other authors cite the Pinkham
brothers as originators of the portrait idea. In any case, the image was not used consistently
during the first years; Hubbard and the Pinkhams were apparently experimenting with different
kinds of advertising copy.83 At one point, they investigated the possibility of merging the
trademark and the packaging. A representative of the Salem Glass Works in New Jersey
expressed doubt about manufacturing “a bottle with a face - or shape of a person’s head - I have
never seen one yet that had any expression. It would be very expensive to get up the moulds.”84
But the effectiveness of the trademark cannot be explained solely by its features. Once
they started buying newspaper and billboard advertising, the Pinkhams bought a prodigious
amount of it, and there is no doubt that the company’s success was due at least in part to the
sheer volume of contact that consumers had with the advertising. When the company was only
five years old, an Illinois man complained that Lydia “paraded [her] portrait in every county
paper in the United States,” and that her “face pervades the mind of the nation like a
nightmare.”85 By the time she died in 1883, Mrs. Pinkham’s image had become ubiquitous, the
butt of enough jokes that many survive in print. At a League of American Wheelmen banquet
held that year, for example, one speaker commented that bicycling was so healthy that the patent
medicine industry was doomed. “What is to become of the memory of the amiable-looking
Lydia Pinkham,” he asked, inspiring laughter and applause, “whose countenance adorns all the
natural scenery between Quebec and the valley of the Yosemite?”86 Sometimes ubiquity
engendered friendlier interactions. When the company sent a check to G. & C. Merriam & Co.
for a copy of the unabridged dictionary, someone from Merriam replied, “We feel that we are
dealing with old friends, so many times have we seen Mrs. Pinkham’s portrait and our Webster
Advs. side by side.”87
The portrait and signature were the tangible representation of the company image. The
Pinkhams built that image also by creating a modern version of the old-fashioned local herbalist.
Women – and sometimes their husbands – wrote to Lydia Pinkham for medical advice from the
time her medicine began to get a reputation beyond Lynn, and advertisements invited readers to
“Write to Mrs. Pinkham.” Lydia answered all the mail herself during the early years; when her
health began to fail, her son hired women to help her. After she died in 1883, the invitation
remained in the ads, and eventually Lydia’s daughter-in-law, Jennie Pinkham, was represented as
the “Mrs. Pinkham” in charge, although she never actually supervised the correspondence
department. By the 1890s, a staff of thirty women answered questions on a broad range of
women’s health topics, including masturbation and abortion.88
This service – and the company’s questionable advertising practices -- eventually
subjected the Pinkhams to attack. Other proprietary medicine companies also ran such
departments. Editor Edward Bok, in the Ladies’ Home Journal campaign leading up to the 1906
Pure Food and Drug Act, maintained that mail clerks (many of them men) ridiculed women who
had unburdened their hearts, and that lists of correspondents’ names and addresses were sold for
direct mail campaigns. At one nostrum-maker, he explained, clerks fit about 75 standard
answers to the cases presented in the correspondence. The Lydia Pinkham company was not
mentioned, and indeed was never guilty of many of the practices Bok described.89 The next
year, however, under the headline “Pictures that Tell Their Own Stories,” Bok juxtaposed a
photograph of Lydia Pinkham’s gravestone with a 1905 advertisement that implied she was still
alive and suggested that any woman who did not write to Mrs. Pinkham was “responsible for her
own suffering.”90
Traditional and modern business practices
The Lydia E. Pinkham Medicine Company grew fast, thanks to the family’s hard work
and its decision to advertise widely. As Lydia’s trademark face “pervaded the mind of the
nation,” hundreds of newspapers across the country wrote to the company, soliciting ever more
advertising. “How does it come that we are not running your ad?” wrote F.B. Taylor, of the
Indianola, Iowa Advocate Tribune. “How can a paper be expected to live without it?”91
Growth meant more of everything – herbs, bottles, employees, factory and office space,
miles from both consumers and suppliers. At the beginning, the Pinkhams’ cellar kitchen
accommodated manufacturing and packaging, while a corner of the sitting-room served as an
office. In early 1878, after three years, the landlord moved a small building to the next lot, and
later a stable was added in the rear. Two years after that, the company built an addition equal in
size to the original building, but it was soon clear that it would not serve their needs for long.92
An entirely new laboratory was built in 1886, later called Building #1; by 1893, they were
constructing Building #4.93
In every respect, the company’s receipts offer evidence of its growth. In the beginning,
the Pinkhams bought herbs and bottles every few days, as money came in.94 As the business
grew, they purchased materials in larger quantities and went further afield for them. The first
receipt deemed worth saving, dated March 30, 1875, records the purchase of four gallons of
alcohol from a Lynn druggist;95 in October 1876, they bought their first barrel from a Boston
wholesale drug firm.96 At first they sourced herbs in Boston, but by 1880, at least two New York
City wholesale druggists supplied them, including McKesson & Robbins, which sold the
company fenugreek and black cohosh by the keg and the bale.97 In the early years, bottles came
from an apothecary supply store in Boston; by 1881 the Pinkhams were in a position to negotiate
prices with the New Jersey glass manufacturers who supplied that store.98 At first they relied on
Howard’s Express of Lynn to transport goods; by 1883, the company owned one large wagon,
two small ones, and two sleighs, along with horses to pull them.99
From the start, even when money was tight, the Pinkhams paid for help with both menial
work and expert tasks. In Brooklyn in 1876, Dan hired both a boy to pass out pamphlets and a
man who “knows a great many druggists, porters of hotels, horse car conductors and others who
can help him about advertising.”100 Around that time the company paid four people to fold
brochures; Dan suggested that they might rent a folding machine instead.101 A paid worker
washed bottles and took care of the steam boiler; two men did odd jobs in the late 1870s, and
eventually one of them worked full-time on manufacturing.102 By April, 1882, the firm
employed sixteen women and men; a year later, there were twenty-five workers.103
Sales for 1881 were about a quarter of a million dollars. The company used about
345,000 bottles; roots and herbs were bought by the ton; a million was the minimum order for
circulars.104 That fall, the business was reorganized; Dan had died, and his three surviving
siblings became equal partners, having signed an agreement to support their parents. The next
year – after Will, too, had died – the Lydia E. Pinkham Medicine Company was reorganized
again as a family-held corporation.105 The company opened a manufacturing facility in Quebec,
and soon was filling orders from all over eastern Canada and Ontario. By the end of 1883, the
Compound was advertised all over Canada, in every region of the United States, and in sections
of South America; domestic advertising included immigrant newspapers in at least nine
languages.106
Record-keeping during the early years was haphazard. Account books were used for
many purposes, and often reused if not filled up the first time. The earliest surviving record
book, for example, served at different times as a payroll book, a cash account or day book, a
place to list advertising accounts, and a notebook for remedy ideas – and all of these entries were
made in a ledger used by somebody else much earlier, and the faded handwriting was sometimes
crossed out, sometimes not. Within accounts, there was at first no differentiation between
household bills and business expenditures. In August and September of 1877, for example, herb
purchases were mixed in with expenses for Isaac Pinkham’s clothing and the family groceries. 107
As late as 1883, the year after incorporation, the company’s receipts were intermingled with
those for furniture, groceries, clothes, poll taxes, and funerals.108 Decades before the income tax,
there was no agency requiring better record-keeping and accounting, although business people
understood it as a modern way of conducting trade.
Indeed, although the Lydia E Pinkham Medicine Company was in the vanguard of
innovative advertising and marketing, many of its day-to-day business procedures were still oldfashioned. Other such practices included easy credit and free goods or reduced prices offered on
the basis of human feeling. One book records visits from sick women, or sometimes their
husbands, starting in the late summer of 1880, and lists medicine sales to them. In October,
Lydia gave six dozen bottles of Compound to Mrs. Hattie “Goss or Foss promised to pay inside
of 6 weeks she had some year before, we then made a reduction; she had been to the Women’s
Hospital.” In January, she sent two boxes of pills to Sue Burns, of Hardeman County, Tennessee
– “A poor fatherless girl & promised to send six boxes for 3.00." (The regular price was $5.00)
Teachers were special candidates for Lydia’s charity. Lillie T. Gray of Dorchester,
Massachusetts got Compound for her mother; “She has applied for a school and will pay when
she can”. “Will pay when she gets able to earn,” wrote Lydia of a Wisconsin woman three
bottles of Compound, three of blood purifier, and a box of liver pills; “I think she is a teacher.”109
Throughout its early years, the company paid for goods and services with medicine. The
local druggist who supplied the first four gallons of alcohol took payment in a dozen bottles of
the Compound.110 Weeks & Potter, a well established Boston wholesale drug firm, was both the
Pinkhams’ biggest customer and one of their major suppliers of herbs and other merchandise; at
various times, each company paid the other both in goods and cash.111 Many periodicals
soliciting advertising offered to take payment in medicine. A young woman who had dropped
out of Mount Holyoke because of terrible menstrual cramps wrote saying that her father, editor
of a small literary paper, would drop his rule against advertising patent medicine if the Pinkhams
would place an ad and send half the payment in medicine.112 Most editors who took payment in
medicine distributed it through local druggists or a wholesale drug firm. Sometimes it worked
the other way: Parsons, Bangs & Co, wholesale druggists of Portland, Maine, signed an
agreement to act as sole agents for the state of Maine, and solicit advertising from local
papers.113 And on at least one occasion, advertising agent Hubbard took payment in medicine,
having asked the company to send a gross of the Compound to a Providence firm and charge it to
his account.114
This arrangement of paying for goods and services with medicine was sufficiently
unusual to be noticed and commented upon by the credit reporters for the R.G. Dun company,
who visited the Pinkhams for the first time in 1879; the reporter described the firm in positive
terms, describing it as a family business that was probably making money though they did not
require much credit because they traded their medicine for raw materials. Within two years,
Will’s death had raised questions among the reporters’ informants; he had been the company’s
financial principal, in order to keep his father’s creditors away from the assets. Lydia herself
died within another two years, and by then the credit reports suggested a stable company, run by
her remaining son Charles. Soon he displayed the confidence to experiment with not advertising,
and to refuse to give the Dun reporter information. Fortunately the Pinkham company was not
seeking new creditors, because the reporter responded by recommending caution to anybody
who might be thinking of giving the Pinkhams credit, commenting that with Will gone, the
management could not be trusted. Groundbreaking for the new laboratory surprised the
observers. When it was completed in 1886, Charles spoke to the Dun reporter (though he still
did not give many details) and the financial community accepted the company as creditworthy.115
*******
The ups and downs of the credit reporters’ observations remind us that while it is easy
enough in hindsight to attribute the company’s success to innovative advertising and the ubiquity
of Lydia Pinkham’s image, that success could by no means be taken for granted.
Commodification is a complicated, often conflictual and contradictory process involving many
elements of production, distribution, and marketing, and so it was for Lydia E. Pinkham’s
Vegetable Compound and the company’s other medicines. Sourcing raw materials through
established drug wholesalers and processing them in many small batches, the company was able
to reconcile consumer demand for standard goods with the idiosyncratic qualities of plant
materials. Advertising and trademarking were indeed important, but the company image
depended as well on linking the medicine with the potential for help and advice, a modern
variant of the services of the traditional herbalist. And innovative marketing coexisted with oldfashioned business practices as a homemade product was transformed into a global commodity.
These contradictory elements were particularly salient during a time of transition. When
the company began, most American women still made most of their families’ clothing, but they
sewed with commercial textiles; factory-made soap was common, but factory-processed food
was not. By the time of the Pinkhams’ peak success, ready-made clothing and prepared foods
were ubiquitous though not yet universal. As the United States became an industrial society, and
as home production yielded to consumption, modern organizational systems and advanced
production technologies transformed industry itself and new techniques for national marketing
emerged in tandem with new kinds of goods. Proprietary medicine companies were in the
marketing vanguard. But the Pinkham example reminds us that such generalizations amalgamate
the experiences of many companies and many consumers. Individual firms and their proprietors
experimented with marketing plans, struggled with inconsistent raw materials, and tried to satisfy
creditors as well as consumers.
As household routines involved making fewer things and purchasing more, Americans –
once customers who purchased the objects of daily life from familiar craftspeople, storekeepers,
and local practitioners – became consumers. They bought and used factory-made goods as
participants in a national market composed of masses of people associating with companies that
did business on national and international levels. Like their decision-making about other
products, consumers’ choices about proprietary medicines depended on many factors. The
women who bought Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound responded to the factors that
generally influence consumers: the qualities of the product itself, its price and that of its
competitors, its advertising and marketing, their perceptions of their needs. In the midst of a
cultural shift – as daily life became increasingly organized around factory production and mass
consumption – their relationship with “Mrs. Pinkham” merged with those factors.
NOTES
1. Thanks for material support to the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard
University; and to the Cultures of Consumption Programme, funded by the Economic and Social
Research Council and the Arts and Humanities Research Council of Great Britain. For their
always helpful early readings, thanks to Bob Guldin, Phyllis Palmer, and Ann Romines. Thanks
also to Jonathan Morris, Marina Moskowitz, and Frank Trentmann for their useful comments.
2. Dan Pinkham to Will Pinkham, dated “Thursday,” Box 167, folder 3117, Lydia E. Pinkham Medicine
Company Papers, 1859-1968, MC 181, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, hereafter cited as
LEPMC.
3. “Plucky Pinkhams. History of a Lynn Patent Medicine Concern–What Push and Printer’s Ink
Will Do,” [November 1881], “Lydia’s Scrapbook,” Vol. 556, n.p. Microfilm Roll 1, LEPMC.
4. Dan Pinkham to Will Pinkham, dated “Tuesday,” Box 167, folder 3117, LEPMC.
5. Dan Pinkham to Will Pinkham, dated “Monday,” Box 167, folder 3117, LEPMC.
6.
http://www.numarklabs.com/index.php?src=gendocs&link=LydiaPinkham&category=Nutritiona
l%20Supplements, accessed April 2, 2007.
7. Dan Pinkham to Will Pinkham, dated “Thursday,” Box 167, folder 3117, Lydia E. Pinkham
Medicine Company Papers, 1859-1968, MC 181, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute,
hereafter cited as LEPMC.
8. Quoted in Sarah Stage, Female Complaints: Lydia Pinkham and the Business of Women’s
Medicine (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1979), p. 31 and Robert Colyer Washburn,
The Life and Times of Lydia E. Pinkham (G.P. Putnam’s and Sons, 1931), p. 89. These books,
along with Jean Burton, Lydia Pinkham is Her Name (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1949), offer
somewhat different versions of the early years of the company; Stage’s book is both more
scholarly and informed by women’s history.
9. Postcard, H.P. Hubbard to William H. Pinkham, May 10, 1881. Folder 3114, Box 167,
LEPMC.
10. H.P. Hubbard, “The Story of Lydia Pinkham,” Fame, Vol. 1, number 9 (1892), p. 263.
11. Harvard University VIA record, for photo number: MC181-2655-1, Record Identifier:
schM6029,
http://via.harvard.edu:9080/via/deliver/chunkDisplay?_collection=via&inoID=20954&recor
dNumber=8&chunkNumber=2&method=view&image=thumb , accessed December 1, 2005.
For date, see another copy, Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America,
Radcliffe Institute Photonumber: MC181-2655-2.
12. See Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History of American Housework (New York: Pantheon,
1982), pp. 36-40.
13. Dennis B. Worthen, “Compounding in History: Treatment at the Change of Life,”
International Journal of Pharmaceutical Compounding, 5 (September/October, 2001), p. 365.
14.David L. Dykstra, “The Medical Profession and Patent and Proprietary Medicines during the
Nineteenth Century,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 29 (1955), 408-409.
15. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on her Diary,
1785-1812 (New York : Knopf, 1990).
16. Sharla M. Fett, Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), pp. 69, 73-74.
17. Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories (New York: W.W.
Norton & Company, 1981), p. 4.
18. Washburn, Life and Times, p. 68.
19. Charles E. Rosenberg, “The Therapeutic Revolution: Medicine, Meaning, and Social Change
in Nineteenth-Century America,” in Morris J. Vogel and Charles E. Rosenberg, eds., The
Therapeutic Revolution: Essays in the Social History of American Medicine (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979), pp. 7, 13.
20. The first version of the Todd story that I have found is Washburn, Life and Times, p. 64.
Stage, Female Complaints, p. 27 repeats this story, offering no source.
21. Arthur W. Pinkham, Reminiscences (Lynn, Mass: bound typescript, December 9, 1954), Box
160, vol. 531, p. 6, LEPMC.
22. Medical notebook 1878-1888, vol. 537, Microfilm Roll 1, LEPMC.
23. See, for example, Saturday Evening Post, May 21, 1881, p. 15 and January 28, 1882, p. 15;
Peterson’s Magazine, July, 1881, p. 90; The Woman’s Journal, January 7, 1882, p. 7.
24. J.S. Haller, Jr., “Trends in American Gynecology, 1800-1910: A Short History,” New York
State Journal of Medicine (May, 1989), 179-80.
25. See John M. Riddle, Eve’s Herbs: A History of Contraception and Abortion in the West
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 150-151.
26. Unlike earlier writers, Stage points to the issue of options, while Elysa Ream Engelman
emphasizes imagery, in “‘The Face that Haunts Me Ever’: Consumers, Retailers, Critics, and the
Branded Personality of Lydia E. Pinkham,” (PhD. dissertation, Boston University, 2003).
27. Medical notebook 1878-1888, vol. 537, p. 22, Microfilm Roll 1, LEPMC.
28. John S. Haller, Jr., Medical Protestants: The Eclectics in American Medicine, 1825-1929
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994), pp. 142-43.
29. Burton, Lydia Pinkham is Her Name, p. 50; Stage, Female Complaints, pp. 90, 267n3. The
annotated copy of King’s American Dispensatory that these writers mention has disappeared
from the Pinkham papers; the current finding aid lists only the 19th edition (1909), edited by
Harvey Wickes Felter and John Uri Lloyd, and in June, 2005 the archive staff was unable to
locate an earlier one.
30. For modern references, see James Duke’s database, http://sun.arsgrin.gov:8080/npgspub/xsql/duke/plantdisp.xsql?taxon=263 See also Varro E. Tyler, “Was
Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound an Effective Remedy?” Pharmacy in History, 37
(19950, 24-28.
31. Tara Tuckwiller, “A New Dig: Growers use Ginseng Market Method to Sell Black Cohosh,”
Charleston Gazette, November 16, 2003.
32. John Uri Lloyd, et. al., “A Treatise on Macrotys,” Drug Treatise, No. XIII (Cincinnati: Lloyd
Brothers, 1905), pp. 2-4; http://www.usp.org/aboutUSP/history.html , accessed 20 October 2005.
33. John Uri Lloyd, “New Remedies (American),” reprint from Eclectic Medical Journal, April,
1927, John Uri Lloyd Collection, Collection 1/Box 53/Folder 750, Lloyd Library, Cincinnati,
Ohio (hereafter cited as LL).
34. Worthen, “Compounding in History,” p. 365.
35. “History of Lydia E. Pinkham Vegetable Compound Formula,” typescript [1938?], Box 133,
folder 2650, LEPMC.
36. William H. Cook, The Physio-medical Dispensatory: A Treatise on Therapeutics, Materia
Medica, and Pharmacy, in Accordance with the Principles of Physiological Medication
(Cincinnati : Wm. H. Cook, 1869), online at
http://www.ibiblio.org/herbmed/eclectic/cook/SENECIO_AUREUS.htm accessed 20 October
2005.
37. John M. Scudder, M.D., Specific Medication and Specific Medicines.(Cincinnati:
Cincinnati, Wilstach, Baldwin & co., 1870), online at
http://www.ibiblio.org/herbmed/eclectic/spec-med/senecio.html , accessed 20 October 2005.
38. David L. Hoffman, “Life Root,” http://www.healthy.net/scr/MMedica.asp?Id=239 , accessed
20 October 2005.
39. Harvey Wickes Felter and John Uri Lloyd, King’s American Dispensatory, online at
http://www.ibiblio.org/herbmed/eclectic/kings/senecio.html , accessed 20 October 2005.
40. A twentieth-century history of the company written by Arthur Pinkham offers both the
original formula and a 1913 version with four additional herbs. He gives the portion of both
formulas allotted to unicorn root as consisting of equal parts of aletris and chamaelirium.
“History of Lydia E. Pinkham Vegetable Compound Formula,” typescript, Box 133, folder 2650,
LEPMC.
41. Felter and Lloyd, at http://www.henriettesherbal.com/eclectic/kings/aletris.html
42. Felter and Lloyd, at http://www.henriettesherbal.com/eclectic/kings/asclepias-tube.html
43. S.H. Korman, E. Cohen, and A. Preminger, “Psuedo-maple Syrup Urine Disease Due to
Maternal Prenatal Ingestion of Fenugreek,” Journal of Paediatric and Child Health 37(2001),
403-404; D. Tiran, “The use of fenugreek for breast feeding women,” Complementary Therapies
in Nursing and Midwifery. 2003 Aug;9(3):155-6; NM Bedri, “Grandmothers' influence on
mother and child health,” Ahfad Journal. 1995 Jun;12(1):74-86; Deni Bown, Chelsea Physic
Garden Herbal (London: Pavilion, 2001), p 287.
44. See http://www.allayurveda.com/femininezone_leuco.htm , accessed 20 October 2005.
45. John Uri Lloyd, Wolfgang Ostwald and Walter Haller, “A Study in Pharmacy,” Journal of
the American Pharmaceutical Association XIX (October, 1930), 1081. See also John Uri Lloyd,
“Eclectic Fads, No. 2–Alcohol Not ‘An Eclectic Fad,’” Eclectic Medical Journal LXXX (March,
1920), 1-8.
46. [Arthur Pinkham], “History of Lydia E. Pinkham Vegetable Compound Formula,”
typescript, Box 133, Folder 2650, p. 3; “Process of Manufacture,” Box 133, Folder 2651;
Inventory taken December 21, 1883, Box 10, vol. 198, LEPMC.
47. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New
York: Basic Books, 1994), p. 97; Pamela Laird, Advertising Progress: American Business and
the Rise of Consumer Marketing (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1998), pp. 18-19; Daniel Pope, The
Making of Modern Advertising (New York: Basic Books, 1983), p. 232. On the line between
true and false, see Susan Strasser, “Sponsorship and Snake Oil: Medicine Shows and Public
Culture,” in Marguerite Shaffer, ed., Going Public: A Consideration of Public Culture in the
United States (University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming). On branding and
standardization, see Susan Strasser, Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass
Market (New York: Pantheon, 1989).
48. John V. Craven to LEP Co, 2/25/1882, Box 167, folder 3125, LEPMC.
49. S.W. Gould receipt, November 2, 1882, Box 4, folder 21, LEPMC.
50. Clare Olin Ewing and Ernest Elwood Stanford, “Botanicals of the Blue Ridge,” Journal of
the American Pharmaceutical Association, 8 (1919), pp. 22-23.
51. Cook, Physio-medical Dispensatory, at
http://ibiblio.org/herbmed/eclectic/cook/HELONIAS_DIOICA.htm, accessed 24 October 2005.
52. Felter and Lloyd, at http://www.ibiblio.org/herbmed/eclectic/kings/chamaelirium.html ,
accessed 21 October 2005.
53. Ewing and Stanford, “Botanicals of the Blue Ridge.”
54. On coffee, see Carlo Odello, “Factors Influencing Perceived Quality of the Italian Espresso,”
www.espressoitaliano.org/files/quality_espresso.pdf , accessed 7 November 2005.
55. S.W. Gould receipt, May 26, 1882, Box 4, folder 20, LEPMC.
56. For an example of a general store of the 1860s doing business in herbs, see Harper Family
Account Books #2908, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina libraries.
57. Ewing and Stanford, “Botanicals of the Blue Ridge,” p. 21.
58. See “Location of Virburnum Opulus in Maine,” September 23, 1940, Box 133, Folder 2654,
LEPMC, and attached memo from Charles H. Pinkham to his uncle Daniel R. Pinkham, then
vice president of the company.
59. Ewing and Stanford, “Botanicals of the Blue Ridge,” pp. 21-24. For a discussion of the
similar trade in chestnuts in Southwestern Virginia, see Ralph H. Lutts, “Like Manna From God:
The American Chestnut Trade in Southwestern Virginia,” Environmental History 9 (July, 2004),
pp. 497-525. See Susan Strasser, Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash (New York:
Metropolitan Books, 1999), pp. 69-109, for a discussion of the similar nineteenth-century trade
in rags and bones.
60. Letter, February 27, 1951, Letterpress Book A, Calvin J Cowles Papers, PC111.25.1, North
Carolina State Archives, Raleigh (hereafter cited as Cowles Raleigh).
61. Letter, March 18, 1851, to [Dr.] M. Norton, Letterpress Book A, Cowles Raleigh,
PC111.25.1.
62. Margaret Hendrix account settled in part with “sang” [ginseng], Folder 20, December 1956,
Calvin Josiah Cowles Papers, Southern Historical Collection, Manuscripts Dept, Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (hereafter cited as Cowles CH).
63. See Volume 67, Cowles CH. This is a large leather-bound book, marked DAY BOOK on the
spine. For barter activities, see, for example, entries for November 12 (Riley Triplette, Allen
Estes. and Anna Biars) and December 29, 1852 (Alley Dula, N. Lewis, Hugh Nelson, Joel
Brown, and James Gilbert).
64. See Volume 73, Cowles CH. This is a small leather and cardboard book that records barter
from January 2, 1854-December 31, 1856. Many people brought both furs and roots.
65. C. Gleim to Calvin Cowles, July 16, 1856, Folder 16, Cowles CH.
66. Ephraim Larrabee, Baltimore to Calvin Cowles, September 15 1856, folder 17, Cowles CH.
67. J.C. Ayer & Co. to Calvin Cowles, May 5, 1858, Folder 35, Cowles CH.
68. Letter, June 28, 1865, to Larrabee and Son Letterpress Book M, Cowles Raleigh,
PC111.25.1, p. 331.
69. See, for example, Cowles’ 1850-57 account with William Johnson, folder 9, Cowles CH.
70. Ewing and Stanford, “Botanicals of the Blue Ridge,” p. 21.
71. Ewing and Stanford, “Botanicals of the Blue Ridge,” p. 22.
72. See letter, November 25, 1862, Box 5, Cowles Raleigh; William Johnson to Calvin Cowles,
October 31, 1850, Folder 9, Cowles CH.
73. See Stillman & Potter to Cowles, February 27, 1851, Folder 10, Cowles CH. See also
10/13/62 list of herbs and prices signed by Howard, including complaint that the “blood root was
very mouldy and rotten for which a reduction will be made,” Box 5, Cowles Raleigh.
74. See Thayer receipt for 1-1/2 lbs fenugreek seeds, June 26, 1876, Box 1, folder 2, LEPMC.
75. Thayer to Cowles, July 10, 1856, Folder 16, Cowles CH.
76. For early Thayer receipts, see Box 1, folders 2, 4, 5 10, LEPMC.
77. Cristina Grasseni, “Packaging Skills: Calibrating Cheese to the Global Market,” in Susan
Strasser, Commodifying Everything: Relationships of the Market (New York: Routledge, 2003),
p. 260.
78. See Strasser, “Sponsorship and Snake Oil.”
79. See Strasser, Satisfaction Guaranteed, pp. 118-120, 223.
80. See Engelman, “‘The Face that Haunts Me Ever’,” p. 22; Strasser, Satisfaction Guaranteed,
p.97-99.
81. See ads passim on the scrapbook, vol. 556, Microfilm Roll 1, LEPMC. These were also
reproduced in “Life Visits the Lydia Pinkham Factory,” Life, copied in Charles H. Pinkham,
“Advertising Volume I, 1875-1953” (Lynn, 1953), Vol. 328, p. A-53, Microfilm Roll 1, LEPMC.
82. Hubbard, “The Story of Lydia Pinkham,” p. 264. On the signature, see Engelman, “‘The
Face that Haunts Me Ever’,” p. 56n9. For another version, see “Plucky Pinkhams.” For lozenge
wrappers, see scrapbook, vol. 556, Microfilm Roll 1, LEPMC.
83. For example, an identical ad using the image with the signature was published in the
Saturday Evening Post in May, 1881 and January, 1882, and in Peterson’s Magazine during the
intervening July. But fundamentally different text – headlined “Mrs. Lydia E. Pinkham, of
Lynn, Mass., has made the Discovery! Her Vegetable Compound the Saviour of her Sex” –
made up a Women’s Journal ad with no image that appeared two weeks before the second Post
ad. See advertisements, Saturday Evening Post, May 21, 1881, p. 15 and January 28, 1882, p. 15;
Peterson’s Magazine, July, 1881, p. 90; The Woman’s Journal, January 7, 1882, p. 7.
84. John V. Craven to LEP Co., , August 15, 1881, Box 167, folder 3115, LEPMC.
85. F.G. Scott to Lydia Pinkham, March 30, 1880, Box 167, folder 3112, LEPMC.
86. “Speeches Made at the Banquet of the League of American Wheelmen, Monday, May 28,
1883, at Metropolitan Hotel, New York City,” Outing: a Journal of Recreation, July 1883, p.
304. For another early example, see “St. Jacob and the Bull,” Forest and Stream: A Journal of
Outdoor Life, Travel, Nature Study, Shooting, June 29, 1882, p. 423.
87. Receipt, G&C Merriam & Co, June 23, 1882, Box 4, folder 22, LEPMC.
88. Stage, Female Complaints, pp. 105, 115.
89. Edward Bok, “How the Private Confidences of Women are Laughed At,” Ladies’ Home
Journal, November, 1904, p. 18. See also Mark Sullivan, “Did Mr. Bok Tell the Truth?” Ladies’
Home Journal, January, 1906, p. 18, and Mark Sullivan, “How the Game of Free Medical Advice
is Worked,” Ladies’ Home Journal, February 1906, p. 23.
90.Edward Bok, “Pictures that Tell Their Own Stories,” Ladies’ Home Journal, September,
1905, p. 15.
91. F.B. Taylor to LEP Co., February 6, 1883, Box 84, Folder 758, LEPMC.
92. “Plucky Pinkhams.”
93. Arthur Pinkham, Reminiscences, p. 162; Otis Russell to Daniel R. Pinkham, February 20,
1953, Box 133, Folder 2650, LEPMC.
94. See vol. 70o, box 202, LEPMC.
95. Receipt, J.W. Colcord, March 30, 1875, Box 1, folder 1, LEPMC.
96. See Colcord receipt as above; Carter, Harris, & Hawley receipts in Box 1, folders 4, 6,
LEPMC.
97. Receipts, McKesson & Robbins, Box 2, Folder 17o; Peek & Velsor, Box 2, folder 17r,
LEPMC.
98. For glass, see letters in Box 167, folder 3115, LEPMC.
99. Inventory taken Dec. 31, 1883, Box 10, vol. 198, LEPMC.
100. Charles H. Pinkham, “Advertising Vol. 1,” Vol. 328, on microfilm, Reel 1.
101. Payroll, 1877-80, vol. 136o, p. 19, LEPMC.
102. Arthur W. Pinkham, Reminiscences, p. 161.
103. Payroll, April 1882-Apr 1883, vol. 137o, LEPMC.
104. “Plucky Pinkhams.”
105. Charles H. Pinkham, “Advertising Vol. 1, p. 22.
106. Ibid., p. 46.
107. Payroll, 1877-80, vol. 136o, pp. 15, 67, LEPMC.
108. For funerals, see Box 3 folder 18o; Box 5, folder 22, LEPMC.
109. Box 202, vol. 69o, not paginated, LEPMC.
110. Receipt, J.W. Colcord, March 30, 1875, Box 1, folder 1, LEPMC
111. Ledger, 1880, Vol. 74o, pp. 49, 69, Box 202, LEPMC.
112. Quoted in Engelman, “‘The Face that Haunts Me Ever’,” p. 14.
113. Article of Agreement, n.d., and list of Maine newspapers, Box 84 folder 755, LEPMC.
114. H.P. Hubbard to William Pinkham, November 5, 1880, Box 84 folder 761, LEPMC.
115. R.G. Dun Collection, Baker Library, Harvard Business School. Massachusetts, vol. 25, p.
255; Massachusetts, vol. 28, p. 499.