Hood's Sarsaparilla Pills Ad

Hood's Sarsaparilla Pills Ad

This item is an advertisement for Hood’s Sarsaparilla pills which treat “all liver ills”, jaundice, sick headache, biliousness, sour stomach, and nausea. In the advertisements a woman, Amanda Paisley, tells in depth, of her grotesque experience with eczema and scrofula sores and how Hood’s Sarsaparilla cured her. This advertisement is speaking to women as women primarily will buy medicine for their families. Also, because women during this time period were very conscious of their looks and therefore would not tolerate having sores covering their faces or discharge coming from their ears. This would be considered un-ladylike and therefore women would need a treatment to cure this and allow them to return to normal, just as Amanda Paisley did. This idea is also shown in the illustrations of Amanda Paisley who is not shown to be very attractive. Women would therefore see this and purchase Hood’s pills to avoid having sores on their faces like Amanda. Hood’s Sarsaparilla pills do not seem very legitimate. It claims to cure many diseases which are not related. Also, instead of using medical evidence, it uses a story of a woman to promote its product. This could be because Hood’s medicine is aware that exploitation of another woman’s looks will sell more pills than real evidence. This is similar to the Quentins as they exploited other’s to sell their product. Mrs. Quentin shows the extent of the family’s newspaper exploitations as she says, “the paper had stripped bare some family scandal-…that a dozen unhappy people had been struggling to keep out of print…”(“The Quicksand” 155). This shows that the Quentin family newspaper exploited others and printed scandalous stories in order to make an income. They used embarrassing and disreputable stories of others to benefit themselves and to sell their item, similarly to Hood’s pills.

Hood's Sarsaparilla Pills

Hood’s Sarsaparilla Pills. Advertisement. The Ladies’ World. August 1892: 3. Print.

The Ladies' World; August 1892

November 2, 2015

Laura Watters

1890's