Ambition Pills!

[booksandcheeses.livejournal.com]

They also pomade your hair and wax your mustache for you!

.

Comments

[flummoxicated.livejournal.com]

This one's hilarious. I'm kind of surprised they used the word "impotency," it seems so indelicate for the time period.

[planet-x-zero.livejournal.com]

Oh god help me, my Enlarged Veins!

[bluebear2.livejournal.com]

Do we know what was in it? Caffeine or cocaine maybe?

[booksandcheeses.livejournal.com]

Regarding a competing brand called Wendell's:"Louisiana chemists reported that each pill was found to contain a little over one-thirtieth of a grain of strychnin and about one-fifth of a grain of iron in the form of the sesquioxid (ferric oxid). Pepper, cinnamon and ginger were also found and what was probably aloes in very small amounts. These pills are sold at 50 cents a box, each box containing forty-two pills. Under our present lax methods of permitting almost any dangerous drug to be sold indiscriminately, provided it is in the form of a 'patent medicine,' it seems, from the Louisiana findings, that it is possible for any one to purchase enough strychnin in a single box of Wendell's Ambition Pills to kill an adult."
The Journal A.M.A., Apr 6, 1918.

So quite possibly, strychnine!