Vigo County Historical Society

Historical Treasure Article

Historic Treasure of the Week - October 28, 1984
By Elizabeth B. Tuttle
Vigo County Historical Society

Positive Pinkham patent

Lydia E. Pinkham's Vegetable Compound, advertised as "a Positive Cure for all those Painful Complaints and Weaknesses so common to our best female population,," became one of America's most popular patent medicines in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Lydia Estes grew up in a well -too-do Quaker family in the 19th century, a family in which both girls and boys were encouraged to express themselves. She was an advocate of women's rights and the abolition of slavery.

After teaching school several years in Lynn, Mass., Lydia married Isaac Pinkham in 1843.

According to legend, the formula for the elixir which made the Pinkham family famous, came to them through a defaulted debt. A machinist named Todd could not repay a $25 loan and gave Isaac the formula instead. Lydia brewed the concoction of herbs in her home, found it to be beneficial and began to share it with her neighbors. She listed the ingredients in a notebook: unicorn root, life root, black cohosh. pleurisy root and fenugreek root. The herbs were steeped and macerated, percolated through cloth and mixed in a solution about 18 percent alcohol -- a necessary preservative -- and them bottled.

In 1875 some women from Salem appeared at Lydia's door. They had heard of Lydia's medicine and wanted to buy some. She sold them six bottles for $5.

This was the beginning of a family business. The family personified the 19th century image of American enterprise and ingenuity.

In 1879 Lydia's son, Dan, had the idea of using Lydia's portrait as the company symbol. Immediately business doubled. In 1881 the Pinkham ledger books showed $250,000 in annual sales, with about $150,000 put back into advertising.

Lydia was receiving about 150 letters per day due to the fact that her remedy ads encouraged women to write for advice -- which she dispensed with common sense. Cleanliness, diet, exercise, and fresh air were her principles to live by.

The Pinkkham heirs sold the family firm in 1968 to a large pharmaceutical company. The actual manufacturing operation moved to Puerto Rico in 1973, where the compound is still being produced and bottled.

In her book about Lydia Pinkham, "Female Complaints," Sarah Stage said that timing played a large part in Lydia's success. "Lydia Pinkham began selling her vegetable compound in an era marked by medical controversy, public dissatisfaction with doctors, and an obsessive concern with women's weaknesses -- a climate ideally suited to promote the success of the Pinkham venture."

In the 1940s scientists discovered traces of materials with estrogen-like properties in some of the compound's original ingredients. In sufficient quantities, the tonic might have had therapeutic value.

Lydia may have been right -- the tonic may have worked. Certainly millions of women thought it did. Perhaps the relief it provided was as much psychological as it was physical.