I first heard the bawdy Lydia Pinkham ballad sung by my then (wonderful) girl friend Rosmarie Woschnak, a student nurse at St Luke's Hospital in NYC. I was a freshman at Columbia College which was across the street from the hospital. An interesting aside to the story is that my uncle Ben Schneider, recently deceased became the President of the Purdue Frederick drug Company in the 1950s. That company made "Gray's Medicine" a competing product to Pinkham's Compound, which consisted mainly of Sherry wine. He turned the company into an ethical pharmaceutical drug company with the introduction of Senokot, a widely used laxative. Gray's Medicine disappeared and our family benefitted with the gift of a large quantity of the surplus wine. Purdue Frederick went on to market Betadine, the widely used antiseptic.
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