Welcome to the History Tricks, where any resemblance to a boring old history lesson is purely coincidental.

And here's your 32nd summary.

Are your parts broken? Are your emotions leaking out? Are you full of hysteria?

Hide in the closet when the doctor comes around, because Lydia Pinkham can fix you right up.

Let's talk about Lydia Pinkham.

But first, let's drop her into history. In 1873, Queen Victoria's Alexander Palace opened and then burned down 16 days later.

Susan B. Anthony was fined $100 for voting. Prince Edward Island joined Canada as the seventh province.

San Francisco's first cable car service began. Field and Stream Magazine is first published in PT Barton's greatest show on Earth's debuts.

Now the listed performer Colette is born, Napoleon Bonaparte dies, and the panic of 1873 begat a depression which begat the creation of Lydia Pinkham Medicine Company.

And an innovative marketer and businesswoman gets her professional start.

Lydia Estes was born February 9th, 1819, and Lynn Massachusetts. She was the 10th of 12 children of William and Rebecca Estes.

Papah, who was known by all, as Billy had been a shoemaker that is to say a cord wanner, which just sounds fancier.

But he had very shrewdly parlayed some land he owned into assault works during the war of 1812, and had basically raked it in.

So by the time Lydia came along, let's call Papah a gentleman farmer. More gentlemen than farmer, honestly as he kept making these really great real estate investments.

He seemed to have some intuition. Where is development going to go? Good job Papah. The Estes were Quakers.

I know you all think of the black coat of the Quaker Roads Man, and you think super conservative, but open-trayer. Quakers were extremely radical for their day.

Women were equaled women in church, for example, and they believed good works were kind of your passport in.

Even though there seems to be this radical spectrum in Quakers from conservative to liberal, they were still hippies to the average church-going Protestant of the time.

And the Estes family, they were extremely liberal within the confines of the Quaker Church.

Because when the local official friends chapter that's like a Quaker meeting, that's the congregation, when their local would not come out roaring about anti-slavery and become fallen, open abolitionists, the family broke away.

And joined a splinter group called the Comm Outers.

It was sort of like a universalist church, it's a group that they gravitated towards, because they were indeed very vocal abolitionists at this point.

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