Word: compounding
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Within a few years, "Lydia E. Pinkham's Vegetable Compound" was fabulously famous. Lydia's iron smile had been plastered on barns and billboards across the U.S., and her name was in history with Betsy Ross, Jane Addams and Susan B. Anthony. Her story, told in Jean Burton's spry biography, makes the career of a Horatio Alger hero sound like a chronicle of indifferent success...
Keep Me Supplied. Things were hard at first. Lydia made the compound herself in her cellar kitchen; she and her three sons and one daughter bottled it in the evenings while father Isaac read aloud. In her spare time, Lydia wrote advertising circulars which her sons distributed door to door. But sales were precious few until son Dan invaded Brooklyn with 20,000 of his mother's handbills. ("KEEP ME SUPPLIED WITH PAMPHLETS," he wrote exuberantly.) Lydia, it turned out, had as much of a genius for advertising as she had for pounding herbs. She addressed herself directly...
There was no hobbling modesty about her copy either. The compound was "The Greatest Medical Discovery Since the Dawn of History." To U.S. women tortured by tight corsets and breath-killing clothes, she cooed: "That feeling of bearing down...is always permanently cured by its use." The list of complaints which the compound was supposed to cure ran the gamut from dysmenorrhea to nymphomania. Derisively, some citizens suggested that only one claim remained to be made-"A Baby in Every Bottle." As the Pinkham company grew, however, it dropped some of the more extravagant claims and emphasized the value...
Greenbacks & Compounds. In 1878, Dan, who had something of his mother's radicalism in him, ran for the Massachusetts legislature as candidate of the Greenback and Workingmen's Parties. When he spoke at a rally there were cheers for "the Pinkham Boys of Lynn," and, for good measure, another for the compound. Lydia wrote Dan's campaign literature, doggedly weaving puffs for her compound into Greenback propaganda. She urged votes for those who "fight against such an accursed financial system. Thousands of people who are paying for this mismanagement are today suffering from KIDNEY COMPLAINTS, DYSPEPSIA, INDIGESTION...
...Hollywood whip last week, "is that they all bend their legs at the knee as they walk." Few of Hollywood's young actresses seem to have the yeast it takes to rise into the big dough. That yeast, says MGM's Casting Director Billy Grady, is a compound of "beauty and bitchiness." A pinch of acting ability can help...