See Dr. Grace Feder Thompson's
letter appealing for patients, Dr. Pierce's medical
empire and Lydia E.
Pinkham's Vegetable Compound.
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Cardui medicine for difficult
menstruation, leucorrhea, backache,
headache, dizziness and general female
diseases
Box for bottle
and a 1935 price
Cardui
was a 38-proof patent medicine made
from the late 19th century through the
twentieth by the Chattanooga Medicine
Company, of Chattanooga, Tennessee
(U.S.A.). The box containing the
bottle appears below. The museum also
has the full bottle.
Like most such medicine, I think it
owed a lot of its powers to its high alcoholic
content, 19% by volume, which
is more than wine. And like most
patent medicines, it promised to cure
a huge range of ailments, many
incurable even today: tumors, cancer,
"women's diseases," etc. Cardui
specifically claimed to relieve painful menstruation,
which I'm sure it did, numbing the imbiber
several days a month.
In the 1960s, when I was at Johns
Hopkins, I remember the pharmacist of
a drug store next to the campus
telling me that elderly neighborhood
ladies were the main purchasers of
such medicine, its being an acceptable
way to consume alcohol. Respectable
women did not frequent liquor stores.
People deeply
distrusted mainstream doctors
in the last half of the 19th century
in America, justified in many ways,
and patent-medicine makers exploited
this.
SarahAnne Hazlewood generously
donated the Cardui material to this
museum except for the ad below,
which a genealogy researcher kindly
sent.
Large
files, long download
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Above: an ad from the Hammond Times,
page 5, Thursday, November 21, 1935,
showing the price of Cardui. It sat
next to an ad
for Fibs tampons.
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© 1997 Harry Finley. It is
illegal to reproduce or distribute
work on this Web site in
any manner or medium without written
permission of the author. Please
report suspected violations to hfinley@mum.org
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