16 SMITHSONIAN | March 2020Museum, among yellowed advertisements for co-
caine-infused toothache drops and opium-soaked
tampons, I found a tattered promotional pamphlet
for the centerpiece of Yale’s business—Fruitcura, the
product she advertised most widely. Madame Yale
said she had come upon the elixir during a dark pe-
riod, recalling “my cheeks were sunken, eyes hollow
and vacant in expression, and my complexion was to
all appearances hopelessly ruined. My suff ering was
almost unbearable.” She also noted that “physicians
had long before pronounced me beyond their aid.”
But when she imbibed Fruitcura regularly after “dis-
covering” it at age 38 , she “emerged from a life of de-
spair into an existence of sunshine and renewed sen-
sations of youth.” In Yale’s account, sharing Fruitcura
with her “sisters in misery” (that is, selling it to them)
was now her almost sacred purpose.
Her customers returned the favor, to judge from the
“sincere and unsolicited” testimonials in Yale’s pam-
phlets. One woman wrote that she had “been a great
suff erer from female trouble for over ten years, have
been in an infi rmary, and have been treated by some
of the best physicians but received no permanent re-
lief until I commenced to take your remedies.”
The perception that physicians were failing to
help women resolve such complaints was a recur-
ring theme for Madame Yale, as it continues to be for
many wellness entrepreneurs. In the late 19th centu-
ry, medical experts—almost exclusively male—wereprologue
largely helpless in the face of what can only be de-
scribed as an epidemic of acute unwellness among
women, according to Complaints and Disorders: The
Sexual Politics of Sickness, a history published by
Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English in 1973. Af-
fl uent women, especially, complained of amorphous,
endless malaises, fainting and fi nding eating unten-
able, losing their girlhood eff ervescence as they aged
into marriage and childbearing. In response, doctors
often attributed physical complaints to psycholog-
ical ailments and declared that too much activity in
a woman’s mind might lead to dysfunction in her
uterus. They prescribed interminable bed rest. To-
day, the fi eld of medicine has not entirely cured itself
of sexism, of course. Studies have documented that
diseases primarily or only aff ecting women (chronic
fatigue syndrome, endometriosis , polycystic ovary
syndrome, fi bromyalgia) receive less than their share
of research funding. Likewise, physicians have tend-
ed to treat pain diff erently: Women are more likely
than men to be prescribed sedatives instead of pain-
killers—a tendency that some experts interpret as a
holdover from Victorian times, the old, patronizing,
“You’re just being emotional” diagnosis.
When physicians don’t take women’s medical
complaints at face value, entrepreneurs since Ma-
dame Yale’s time have been more than happy to.
They also continue to draw a straight line between
physical health and beauty, especially given that
pursuing wellness is morally acceptable in a way that
the single-minded pursuit of beauty—a.k.a. vanity—
is not. For example, Lauren Bosworth, a blond, white
woman who parlayed a reality TV career into run-
ning her own wellness company, sells supplement
sets such as the “New You Kit,” which promises to
support your “gut, mind, feminine health, skincare
and metabolism.”
In the end, Madame Yale’s seductive sales pitch
proved her downfall. The health claims she off ered
for her products made her vulnerable to the 1906
Pure Food and Drugs Act. In 1908, the U.S. govern-
ment sued Madame Yale for “misbranding of drug
preparations.” The feds seized more than 1,
packages of Yale’s products and condemned them as
frauds, reporting that Fruitcura was “found to con-
sist of largely water with 16.66% alcohol by volume,
29.71% of sugar and small quantities of plant drugs.”
Yale was slapped with a $500 fi ne and barred from
selling seven of her most popular products, includ-
ing Fruitcura, Blush of Youth, and Skin Food—al-
most a third of her total lineup.
Madame Yale’s appeal had supposedly been based
on her honest relationship with women and her de-Madame Yale’s
“Excelsior Com-
plexion Bleach,”
one of 26 items
she advertised
in her 1894
catalog.IN THE END, MADAME YALE’S
SEDUCTIVE SALES PITCH PROVED
HER DOWNFALL.THE^ NAT
IONAL^ LIBRARY^ OF^ MEDICIN
E^WELLNESS