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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