Business & Finance: Family Trouble

Unrivaled by Father John or the Smith Brothers, Lydia Pinkham was for years the most vivid personality in the U. S. medicine chest. Lydia Estes Pinkham died in Lynn, Mass, in 1883. Her prim pictures, however, remained on every package of tier famed Vegetable Compound, and clerks went on answering in her name 100,000 letters per year from women who thought the compound relieved their periodic ills. When the late Edward W. Bok started his crusade against patent medicines, he debunked the post-mortem Pinkham correspondence by publishing in his Ladies' Home Journal a...

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