The song was inspired by Lydia E. Pinkham's Vegetable Compound, a well-known herbal-alcoholic patent medicine for women.

Even such frauds as the favourite American elixir, Lydia Pinkham's Vegetable Compound, which are ostensibly remedies for specifically feminine ills, anatomically impossible in the male, are chiefly swallowed, so an intelligent druggist tells me, by men.

I owe it all to Lydia Pinkham's Vegetable Compound.

He found hand towels, soap, bath powder, baking soda, a toothbrush, nail files, safety pins, matches, Sweet Caporal cigarettes, bottles of Ayer's pills, Lydia E. Pinkham's Vegetable Compound, Sherman's Papillary Oil, and a half pint of quinine.

According to Mr. Bleed, he got 17 bottles, including a medicine bottle for a consumption cure and a bottle for a women's tonic called Lydia Pinkham's Vegetable Compound.

It was used as a component in Lydia Pinkham's original Vegetable Compound.

Mass marketed from 1876 on, Lydia E. Pinkham's Vegetable Compound became one of the best known patent medicines of the 19th century.

The original formula for Lydia Pinkham's Vegetable Compound was:

Even Lydia Pinkham's Vegetable Compound, patented in 1876 "for the female discomforts," is advertising itself as Lydia Pinkham Herbal Compound, "now with black cohosh."

One I was quite sure of was explained in the voluminous literature that came with the well-wraped bottle of that popular elixir, Lydia Pinkham's Vegetable Compound.