‘Tired, Worried and Overworked’: An International Imagined Community of Nervous Sufferers in Medical Advertisements, 1900-1920

Widely advertised around 1900, Pink Pills (patent medicines containing zinc or iron) were promoted to cure all kinds of ailments, including neurasthenia (‘weakness of the nerves’). The extensive advertisements portraying their consumers connected the ritual of daily pill taking to new psychiatric notions of ‘nervous fatigue’ as a legitimate modern condition. All over the world, newspaper readers were given the opportunity to identify with other ‘neurasthenics’: people they had never met, but who, like them, apparently struggled with the tensions and quick pace of modern life. Through reading newspapers and consuming Pink Pills, one could feel part of this imagined community. Thus, the patent medicine business was instrumental in the establishment of new psychiatric ways of thinking about oneself and the world. Keywords: patent medicines, neurasthenia, history, newspaper advertisements, imagined community In 1907, a Mr W.W. Munroe, of 16 Hazel Park, Everett, Massachusetts, was quoted in an advertising campaign in American local newspapers as saying he had become ‘ill from overwork’. While working as a foreman in a large manufacturing establishment in Boston, during a particularly hot summer where he was working in confined conditions, he started losing weight, strength and appetite. His memory started to fail him, he lost interest in life, and friends remarked on his abysmal condition. One of his friends recommended a possible remedy: Pink Pills, which ‘actually make new blood, and have cured such diseases as rheumatism, nervous and general debility, indigestion, and nervous headache’. The pills worked for Mr Munroe, he claimed. After several weeks, he had fully recovered. Pink Pills, an originally Canadian product, were introduced in America and many other countries during the late nineteenth century. The pills were said to help against many ailments that were caused by ‘physical and mental exhaustion’, such as migraines, an upset stomach, anaemia and the psychiatric condition called neurasthenia (nervous weakness). They refreshed the blood and gave its users a rosy complexion, hence the name. In the first decades of the twentieth century, advertisements for Pink Pills were omnipresent in newspapers around the world. Many of the ads were journalist-style written reports on people who, like Mr Munroe, were greatly revitalized thanks to the Pink Pills. Taken together, I will argue, these ads created an international imagined community of nervous sufferers.

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