The Minnesota Historical Society got a grant several years ago to digitize all of the issues of the Saint Paul Pioneer Press, starting in 1861. For some reason, they picked 1961 as the end year.
The results — which are also OCRed and therefore searchable — went online today.
I spent a few hours looking up some of my favorite subjects, but while I was doing that, I came across this ad from an issue in the earliest years of the 20th century:
It caught my attention because of its design and the wording of the large headline, but then I wondered, What the heck is varicocele? (Here's the Wikipedia page: be prepared for penis photos.) Is it one of those diseases or conditions that doesn't happen anymore, or has its name changed?
I didn't read the small type in the ad when I first saw it, so I didn't realize how risque the ad is. At the time this ran, ads that targeted women for their sexual health problems would not have been so forthright about their purpose, even in the small print.
At any rate, knowing what I have since learned, it seems unlikely the Heidelberg Medical Institute's "positive and painless" cure did anything to solve the real problem of varicocele. But their ad was ahead of its time in attracting attention, I would say.
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