Not a laxative! You might wonder: wouldn’t something that advertised its, er, lubricating qualities, and went out its way to say it wasn’t a LAXATIVE but was a gentle means of attaining regularity - well, isn’t that a laxative?

Yes! But no. I gather from ads of the era that laxatives were often violent things; they’d empty you out in a trice, as if you’d tied a piece of rope to a wad of steel wool, waited until you passed the end of the string, tied it to a horse and splashed kerosene on his hindquarters.

You have to wonder how much of this stuff did anything. Judging from the picture of Dad in the upper left, he looks like he’s passing a calcified starfish.