Robert Collyer Washburn

If someone living today has heard of Lydia Pinkham's Vegetable Compound, it is probably as a quack medicine supported by immense advertising featuring the face of Lydia Pinkham. This is true but deceptive. Lydia Pinkham (1819-1883) certainly did not set out to be the Dr. Oz of 1900. Observe her birth date. She was pre-Semmelweis, pre-Pasteur, pre-Lister. When she was young, doctors (other than surgeons) really were mostly quacks, and had almost no medications worth the name. That was changing by the time Lydia died, but a lot of people hadn't gotten the message yet.

Lydia and her family were reformers -- abolitionists, temperance activists, proponents of women's rights, firm believers in education. Frederick Douglass was a personal friend of the family. On most subjects, they were ahead of their time. They were also a little bit nutty -- tempted by Swedenborgianism, and spiritualism; after two of her adult sons died, Lydia turned to a medium to try to contact them. And they were believers in the power of nature -- Lydia collected information about the healing power of herbs, for instance. One of her concoctions, containing a wide variety of plant materials preserved in alcohol, seemed to be therapeutic. (Given that it was something like 40% alcohol, it is understandable that it would leave the users feeling no pain! And, yes, the temperance activist used alcohol in her elixir; somehow, being a "medicine" made it seem less like pure hooch.)

Pinkham would probably have stayed just another village wise woman, or its nineteenth century equivalent, had it not been for the Panic of 1873. Her husband Isaac, who had made his money as a land speculator, was ruined. The family had nothing -- except a recipe for an elixir that had a local reputation as a treatment for "female complaints." With a lot of luck, and a lot of advertising that eventually featured Lydia's aged-looking face, they converted this into a product that remained on shelves for decades and made Lydia's children and grandchildren rich.

Although her nostrum (technically not a patent medicine; the recipe was not patented) was just that, Lydia was not really like the purveyors of other concoctions. (Though her son Dan, who was responsible for the advertising that made the compound popular, probably was -- he was a pure huckster.) Along with her compound, she gave advice about women's physiology that was, even in the 1870s, better than what the doctors turned out -- she called a uterus a uterus, e.g. Even though her children were willing to make up stories and lie through their teeth, Lydia seems to have mostly stuck to her liberal principles.

This 1931 book was, as best I can tell, the first attempt to tell the Pinkham story -- it was written at a time when the Vegetable Compound was still sold, although reformulated to comply with Pure Food and Drug regulations.

Sadly, if many of Lydia Pinkham's ideas belong to the twentieth century rather than the nineteenth, Robert Collyer Washburn's ideas belong firmly in the nineteenth. Or maybe the negative nineteenth -- he sounds like the sort to hit a woman over the head with a club and drag her off by her hair. He constantly refers to Lydia's (very mild) feminism as if she were an insane radical. He compares her to Mary Baker Eddy, which is simply absurd. He is both contemptuous of her attitudes and jealous of the family's success, without being willing to give her credit for her good ideas or for her basic hard work and intelligence. Nor is this book a good enough read to make up for its constant patronizing of its subject.

I don't want to make out Lydia Pinkham as a great woman or a saint. It would have been far better had she realized the limits of her compound and not let the advertising go beyond that. But she deserves credit for being forward-thinking, and her family deserves credit (if it can be called credit) for many of the techniques of modern marketing -- without being either as in-your-face as a bulk mail campaign or as dangerous for privacy as a social media company. She deserves better than this book -- and she eventually got it, in Jean Burton's Lydia Pinkham Is Her Name (1949) and Sarah Stage's Female Complaints (1981). If you want to learn about Lydia Pinkham, start with those (they're much easier to find anyway), and let this slip back into the slime it came out of.… (mehr)