#popular medicine
The designs of popular medicine trade cards for often-dubiously manufactured products were meant to catch the eye with a glance as well as to be looked at repeatedly.
For Dr. Kilmer’s Female Remedy, images of the private and public domains and relationships of women predominate. The visual metaphors show the life to be had by a middle-class Kilmer consumer transformed from the confinement of immobility on a veranda to one of freedom for recreation, travel, and tranquility.
This female empowerment imagery may also have been read as the freedom from motherhood. Advertised as a cure for “suspicious growths,” the rhetoric suggests its possible use as an abortifacient as well.
