"Ohhh, we'll sing of Lydia Pinkham..."

[Iludium Phosdex]

[blockquote]
"Ohhh, we'll sing of Lydia Pinkham,
And her love of the human race;
How she sells her Vegetable Compound,
And the papers, they publish her face!!"
[/blockquote]
Thus went the chorus of a popular ballad of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in homage to one Lydia E. Pinkham of Lynn, Massachusetts (as in her Vegetable Compound "For the Diseases of Women," since restyled Herbal Compound).

In any case, it just so happens that there are two rather interesting Urban Legends relating to Miss Pinkham as ought be discussed here:

• For some reason or another, many small-town newspaper editors found a convenient source of a picture for some prominent woman in the news by using the portrait of Lydia E. "herself" from the patent-medicine adverts, so giving her Vegetable Compound some unintentional free advertising.
  
• In response to the open invitation extended in advertising inviting women to discuss their own health issues ("write Lydia Pinkham, Lynn, Mass."), was it true that college fraternity boys composed letters under feminine pseudonyms discussing topics like frigidity, timidity and suchlike, just for cheap laughs and the prospect of how "Lydia Pinkham" would respond, if @ all?

Has anyone any 411 (as it were) on these legends?

[Bonnie]

Originally Posted by Iludium Phosdex

For some reason or another, many small-town newspaper editors found a convenient source of a picture for some prominent woman in the news by using the portrait of Lydia E. "herself" from the patent-medicine adverts, so giving her Vegetable Compound some unintentional free advertising.

Although a 1931 Time magazine piece on The Life and Times of Lydia Pinkham, Robert Collyer's book, held that

[w]hen Lydia got the idea of printing her picture with the ad, she soon became best known woman in the U. S. Pictures in newspaper offices were scarce; Lydia Pinkham's portrait often doubled for such stars as Queen Victoria, Actress Lily Langtry

and a 1971 article in The American Heritage on patent medicines shared that

[i]n the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when country editors were not well supplied with portraits of prominent women, the electrotype of Mrs. Pinkham was often the only one to be found in the print shop, with the result that her face was presented at one time or another as a recent picture of Lily Langtry, as Dr. Mary Walker, the lady who wore men's trousers, as President Cleveland's new bride, as Sarah Bernhardt, and even as Queen Victoria

in the late 19th century this was just a gag, at least in big-city newspaper offices. (I mean, if she were the most recognized woman in the United States by virtue of her portrait appearing in newspaper ads, surely readers of those papers wouldn't be fooled by the substitution of her image for, say, the more voluptuous Lily Langtry.)

From John P. Young, Journalism in California (San Francisco: Chronicle Publishing Company, 1915). (Emphasis mine, below.)

The most notable change in journalistic methods during the eighties of the nineteenth century was the growing disposition to use pictures. Reference has been made to early efforts in that direct, but they never developed into a steady feature. The facetious were still inclined as late as 1885 to charge that the portrait of Lydia Pinkham, which appeared in the advertising columns of most dailies of the period, was made to do duty as a representation of all sorts of celebrities "without regard to sex, color or previous condition of servitude." There is a tradition in the artroom of The [San Francisco] Chronicle that a timid effort to illustrate reading matter begun in 1880 was abandoned because of the ribald jokes and the insistent prediction that all efforts to produce passably decent pictures in papers printed on rapid perfecting presses must fail. Whatever the cause, it is a fact that Sunday illustrations were dropped for several years. In June, 1885, there was a sudden outburst of artistic energy and, after that date, pictures were regularly printed in the Sunday magazine section and sometimes appeared in the daily. On January 1, 1887, The Chronicle annual appeared with a full-page map of California and some fifty illustrations of business houses and manufacturing plants of San Francisco. By this time the use of illustrations in the daily had become common, and they were growing in size, a fact which testifies that the editor was becoming hardened to criticism, or that the art had really advanced sufficiently to destroy the point of the Lydia Pinkham joke. [p. 130]

and

In the early nineties, the opportunity to secure matter from a syndicate was welcomed by the Sunday editor of The Chronicle. Aspirants for literary fame were less common then than they became later, and it was often difficult to secure enough contributions to make a satisfactory presentation. But this condition of affairs did not endure long. Very soon after the zinc etching process had reached such a stage of development that the Lydia Pinkham joke ceased to be funny there was a fine crop of authors, and it was no longer necessary to prepare special articles to "fill up" with, although illustrated papers continued to be written by the office force. [pp. 154-155]

-- Bonnie

[Mycroft]

Does anyone else this side of the pond think of the old Scaffold song "Lilly the Pink"?

http://www.lyricsvault.net/songs/2952.html

[Ieuan ab Arthur]

Hi Mycroft:

Originally Posted by Mycroft

Does anyone else this side of the pond think of the old Scaffold song "Lilly the Pink"?

http://www.lyricsvault.net/songs/2952.html

That's what I thought when I first read the title of this thread. Unfortunately, your link times out for me. However, the chorus of the version we used to sing was:

We'll drink, a drink, a drink,
To Lilly the Pink, the Pink, the Pink,
The Saviour of the Human Race!
She invented Medicinal Compound
That was efficacious in every case

This, of course, was followed by many racious (and off-colour) verses of what one could do with said "Medicinal Compound."

Ta ra 'wan,

Ieuan "Ebenezer thought he was Julius Caesar" ab Arthur

[quiltsbypam]

Originally Posted by Mycroft

Does anyone else this side of the pond think of the old Scaffold song "Lilly the Pink"?

http://www.lyricsvault.net/songs/2952.html

That's what I thought it was, too.


Uncle Paul he,
was very small he...

[Scout]

Originally Posted by Mycroft

Does anyone else this side of the pond think of the old Scaffold song "Lilly the Pink"?

http://www.lyricsvault.net/songs/2952.html

Thank you, I thought I was going mad then and had been mishearing the lyrics all these years. I've never heard of the song in the OP and assumed they were talking about lilly the pink!

Scout.