Madam Yale, early entrepreneur in health products of dubious quality

March 3, 2020 12:15 PM

Madame Yale had been delivering “Beauty Talks” coast to coast since 1892, cannily promoting herself in ways that would be familiar to consumers in 2020. She was a true pioneer in what business gurus would call the wellness space—a roughly $4.5 trillion industry globally today—and that achievement alone should command attention. Curiously, though, she went from celebrated to infamous virtually overnight, and her story, largely overlooked by historians, is all the more captivating as a cautionary tale. Madame Yale Made a Fortune With the 19th Century’s Version of Goop (Emmeline Clein for Smithsonian Magazine).

More from Clein's article:

Like Paltrow, Madame Yale was an attractive blond white woman—“as beautiful as it is possible for a woman to be,” the New Orleans Picayune said, and the “most marvelous woman known to the Earth since Helen of Troy,” according to the Buffalo Times. Paltrow’s company markets “UMA Beauty Boosting Day Face Oil,” “GoopGlow Inside Out Glow Kit” and “G.Tox Malachite + AHA Pore Refining Tonic.” Madame Yale hawked “Skin Food,” “Elixir of Beauty” and “Yale’s Magical Secret.” Paltrow is behind a slick periodical, Goop, that is part wellness magazine and part product catalog. Madame Yale’s Guide to Beauty, first published in 1894, is a self-help book that promotes her products. Both women have aspired to an unattainable ideal of biochemical purity. Goop claims its G.Tox will “increase cell turnover and detoxify pores.” Madame Yale said her “Blood Tonic” would “drive impurities from the system as the rain drives the debris along the gutters.” And both, importantly, embodied their brands, presenting themselves as the best possible evidence of their efficacy, though Madame Yale, living in a simpler time before digital media (there are thousands of pictures of Paltrow available online), was far more explicit about it. (Goop did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
[...]
When physicians don’t take women’s medical complaints at face value, entrepreneurs since Madame Yale’s time have been more than happy to. They also continue to draw a straight line between physical health and beauty, especially given that pursuing wellness is morally acceptable in a way that the single-minded pursuit of beauty—a.k.a. vanity—is not. For example, Lauren Bosworth, a blond, white woman who parlayed a reality TV career into running her own wellness company, sells supplement sets such as the “New You Kit,” which promises to support your “gut, mind, feminine health, skincare and metabolism.

If you'd like to see some of the promotion from Maude Mayberg, a.k.a. Madame Yale, Hathi Trust has Madame Yale's system of physical and beauty culture.

As recounted by Hair Raising Stories, an OldWeb site ("This site is best viewed in Internet Explorer 5.0 or later"): In 1909, a court judgement was rendered in the District of Columbia against her company regarding the fact that the products violated the Pure Food and Drug Act They siezed 36 dozen packages of the Hair Tonic. They analyzed it and found it to contain 15.56% alcohol, 82% water, and some amount of glycerin and perfumed with bergamot oil. At that time, the company was called S. Kahn & Sons and Madame Yale was called Maude Yale Bishop Wilson, as recounted on the vintage bottle collection site.

posted by filthy light thief (4 comments total)

A um... person... in my life had me watch a single episode of Goop Lab on Netflix. The topic was a European fellow who promoted deep breathing (at one point it was referred to on the show as hyper-ventilating, which to me—a non-doctor—it appeared to be), light exercising, then jumping into ice-cold water (or a very cold shower). The overall treatment was talked up as helping to ease anxieties and for general well-being.

His claim was that the breath exercises made the body less acidic which leads to better health? Hmm. Aside from that, there weren't too many far-out claims made and the show was less sales-focused and certainly less "woo" than I was expecting. Not a single mention of opium-soaked tampons as in the linked article.
posted by SoberHighland at 12:52 PM on March 3, 2020

The link to her book is both fascinating and depressing. Make women feel guilty about how they look and then promise them a "cure." It must be one of history's oldest cons.
posted by not_the_water at 1:26 PM on March 3, 2020 [2 favorites]

Make women feel guilty about how they look and then promise them a "cure." It must be one of history's oldest cons.

Add in "be someone who takes women's medical complaints seriously" (in light of Men of Medicine ignoring or gaslighting women), and you have a blockbuster business plan.

The article focuses heavily on Madam Yale, and the comparison to Paltrow as a modern parallel (which I then mirrored in my post), but I think that the lack of actual medical support and service is a major element in this story.

In Madam Yale's time, she's just one of many entrepreneurial proprietors (Hair Raising Stories index), but I wonder how unique she was in being a woman who focused on women's maladies and concerns. Perhaps, as an attractive woman, she served as not only the President, but also a model client.
posted by filthy light thief at 1:39 PM on March 3, 2020 [3 favorites]

His claim was that the breath exercises made the body less acidic which leads to better health?

Ok the only thing I can think of that this could have come from is that when you exercise, your cells also respirate more and this can lead to a build up of carbon dioxide, making the blood more acidic, and this is fixed by increasing your breathing to exhale the carbon dioxide. How this could help when you're not exercising is a mystery to me though.
posted by LizBoBiz at 3:52 AM on March 4, 2020