Lydia E. Pinkham's Vegetable Compound (advertisement, 1882)

The sentences running up both margins of this column read Woman can sympathize with woman and Health of woman is the hope of the race. Between them sits an engraved portrait of Lydia Pinkham, with her signature and the words Yours for Health below it. One history of the company, on the Embryo Project site, says her portrait appeared on advertisements and packaging for decades and made her among the best-known women in the United States.

The text claims the Vegetable Compound as a positive cure for female complaints and lists them: falling and displacement, ulceration, tumors, bloating, headaches, nervous prostration, depression. It also claims to relieve kidney complaints in either sex. Orders went to an address in Lynn, Massachusetts, at $1 a bottle or six for $5, by mail in the form of pills or lozenges, and the ad says Mrs. Pinkham answers letters of inquiry. Liver Pills, 25 cents a box, are offered at the bottom of the column.