ADS: Old advertisements, such as those seen in the Era in the late 1800s, are so different from today’s ads.

For one, it was long before the Federal Trade Commission’s regulations on truth in advertising.

Perhaps that is why ads for such projects as Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound were prevalent. While the ads themselves weren’t large, the message was hard to miss.

“Women are careless. They overestimate their physical strength,” the advertisement began. This was in an 1895 edition of The Era.

You see, women do not fully realize “how delicate their sensitive organism is. The girl who has just become a woman can hardly be expected to act wisely; everything is so new to her.”

Why should she get her feet wet, or get too cold, those conditions might suppress or render irregular the “peculiar ailments of women.”

Millions of women rely on Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound to help with “female weakness” and “chronic inflammation of the womb,” the ad explained.

In present times, we set aside our carelessness and peculiar weaknesses and looked up some further information on Mrs. Pinkham’s cure all.

The compound was a blend of true unicorn root and pleurisy root — and an alcohol content of 18%.

Regardless of what was in it, women swore by the Vegetable Compound, enough so to bring the Pinkhams out of financial hardship and into a business that grossed nearly $300,000 a year — before 1900, Britannica tells us (the online version, because the actual encyclopedia stopped printing in 2012).

A version of Mrs. Pinkham’s “medicine” is still sold today, and is available on Amazon, of course, but without the 18% alcohol content.