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Go to Cardui booklet covers, examination sheet, Home Treatment for Women
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Leer la versión en español de los siguientes temas: Anticoncepción y religión, Breve reseña - Olor - Religión y menstruación - Seguridad de productos para la menstruación.

 

"The 20th Century Song Book"
Chattanooga Medicine Company, U.S.A., 1904
Complete booklet, 32 pages plus covers

Although the following (much of which appears in Home Treatment for Women) applies to this booklet as well as to Cardui's Home Treatment, this booklet seems to feature women of a higher social class - and men and many animals, which the medicine also helped. Many of the readers were farmers or at least rural people, judging by the testimonials.

Singing and playing musical instruments at home was common before radio and record players, and rural people probably appreciated the free music interspersed with tips on curing themselves and their animals - all with Cardui and related products.

The booklet contains an interesting description of the size and nature of the company and how it was started. No less than a man of the cloth invented Wine of Cardui, reassuring readers with the godly connection. But it gave a good buzz.

Cardui, one of thousands of patent medicines in the 19th and 20th centuries, seems to have found favor mainly in the southern half of the United States, judging by the origins of the many testimonials in this booklet. Maybe the Chattanooga Medicine Co., based in Tennessee, distributed its bottles and packets only to that area. But this booklet lists factories in San Francisco and St. Louis and, of course, Chattanooga; and a Martha Killian writes from South Africa to praise the tonic.

One of the many afflictions these three medicines - Cardui, Black Draught, and Cardoseptic - treated was "female weakness," which the unremitting housework and endless childbirths and children might have brought on (but men took it too - and animals). Medicine, not perfect today, was much less so in the 19th and early 20th centuries and the sick and tired often looked to their druggists for healing, just as we do today. Think of all the supplements, mostly unregulated, that we swallow, alcohol (see the Cardui label with ingredients) among them. Same thing back then.

And this is also the same: if people wait long enough, with or without medicine, many disorders clear up by themselves, something doctors know and knew. So during the weeks and months and years these folks imbibed Cardui and its siblings some disorders would have cleared up anyway.

Lydia Pinkham made similar cure-alls and became fabulously successful.

Booklets like this are museums of rural speech. Some words and phrases are probably gone forever. I would love to hear the speakers of the time talk.

This booklet appeared before radio began to smooth out regional differences in the 1920s by allowing listeners to hear speakers far away from the little towns and farms that many never left. But my stepmother, from North Carolina, dumbfounded an elevatorful of New Jersey residents in that state by exchanging some words with my father (a New Jerseyite). She later laughed and said that one person told her they did not know people really spoke like that and thought she was faking it. So even today there are surprises. Vive la différence!

As an artist I find the illustrations fabulous, better than the Wall Street Journal's daily portraits of people in the news. Drawing for publication prevailed over photography then, which had just started in printed media a few decades earlier so there was a large number of experienced artists available.

See the Cardui booklet covers, ads & bottle label with ingredients; examination sheet; and The Twentieth Century Song Book.
Midol pain reliever pills for menstruation: old tins (containers), old ads, old booklet (selections)
More patent medicine on this site || Dr. Grace Feder Thompson's letter appealing for patients - Dr. Pierce's medicines - Dr. E. C. Abbey's The Sexual System and Its Derangements (1882) - Dr. Young's rectal dilators - Orange Blossom medicine - ad for Ergoapiol (1904), abortion substance - Lysol douche liquid ad, 1948 (U.S.A.)
YOUR remedies for menstrual period pain and problems. See more remedies here.

Below: Front cover. The paper booklet measures 5 1/8 x 7 3/4" (about 13 x 19.8 cm) and has
a looped string, probably for hanging near the piano.
Below, right: A section of Charles Dana Gibson's pen-and-ink drawing "The American Colony [in England]," 1899, five years before the Cardui booklet. Gibson's virtuosity earned him a huge income and he created illustrations for books and the leading American magazines. He's better than the artist of the Song Book but you see the same faces in the young women; compare this profile with the one in the lower right corner of the Song Book (and see a definite case of copying). You see the same trend in Irving Nurick's drawings for Kotex (and other companies) decades later - but, Oh! are the faces from the two eras different! Ideals change. Try drawing this with a pen you have to dip every few strokes; try doing it any way you want to see how hard it is.
 
 
Below: Gibson influenced American illustrators for years, here, James Montgomery Flagg, known to you for the poster "I Want You for [the] U.S. Army." These two artists were masters in what is known as the Golden Age of American Illustration. The lady, by the way, is about to make the putt that the gentleman at right, whom I cut, missed. (See a girl teaching her mother to play golf in a Modess ad two decades or so later.)
 
 
Below: We know Gibson best for the Gibson Girl, below, in bathing suits in Gibson's book Americans (1900).
Their hauteur smolders on the beach, but not from the sun, and their hair never touches the water.
(The Gibson pictures are excerpted from The Gibson Girl and Her America, edited by Edmund Gillon, 1969; source unknown for the Flagg.)
 

NEXT inside front cover & page 1 pages 2-3 4-5 6-7 8-9 10-11 12-13 14-15 16-17 18-19 20-21 22-23 24-25 26-27 28-29 30-31 32-inside back cover back cover || All patent medicine on this site || Cardui's booklet covers, examination sheet, & Home Treatment for Women || See Dr. Grace Feder Thompson's letter appealing for patients; Dr. Pierce's medical empire; Lydia E. Pinkham's fabulously successful vegetable compound & trinkets & publications; Dr. E. C. Abbey's The Sexual System and Its Derangements (1882); Dr. Young's rectal dilators; Orange Blossom medicine; ad for Ergoapiol (1904), an abortion substance; and Lysol douche liquid ad, 1948 (U.S.A.) - YOUR remedies for menstrual period pain and problems. See more remedies here.
Midol pain reliever pills for menstruation: old tins (pill containers), ads, booklet (selections)

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