Most Unhinged Victorian Ad

Before anyone regulated a claim, advertisers said whatever they wanted, and the nineteenth century is the clearest record we have of what that looks like.

The results are stranger than the summary suggests. Patent medicines promised to cure unrelated conditions in the same paragraph and frequently contained opium, cocaine or a great deal of alcohol, none of which was disclosed. Corsets were marketed under doctors' names to imply medical endorsement that did not exist. Pain killers were sold for use on both people and livestock with no apparent distinction drawn between the two markets. Trade cards were beautifully lithographed and used that craftsmanship to attack a competitor's beans at length. Forty advertisements are in, all of them genuine printed material from the period rather than parody or reconstruction.

The images are from Wikimedia Commons and are old enough to be firmly in the public domain, which is what makes a bracket like this possible at all. Judge the pitch rather than the artwork — several of the most unhinged claims sit inside some of the most competent design here.