Drug Store windows

During the 80’s, I saw sickroom products in a drug store window display during flu season. Among the items was a rectal thermometer.

I can remember as kids, when we went shopping, we’d usually stop at the drugstore at some point. Once loose in the store, the first place we'd head too, was the Feminine Hygiene aisle. Back in the fifties, they had all sizes and kinds of douche/enema bags along with various styles of nozzles on display. As we headed to that area of the store, my brother and I usually got a hard-on, anticipating what we’d see once there. If we happened to be with our teenage aunts, and they saw us looking around at the various displays, they’d tease us about it. The funny thing was, they were just as curious and excited as we were about looking at the displays.

I am old enough to remember when the local drugstore had a selection of douche and enema equipment. The ones I went to did not have window displays of that stuff but there was usually a good selection of things near the feminine hygiene products. I would linger there and check for something new or different than what I was using at the time, each time I needed to be in the area for Tampax, or whatever. In those days, a woman looking over the douche or enema bags didn’t draw attention like it would today. They didn’t have as good of a selection as the Sears or Wards catalog but some were not bad. Slowly that all disappeared, leaving the current drugstore with a single combo douche/ enema bag, if they have anything at all.

While I am too young to have been around for the golden era, during the 80s and 90s, it seemed like some areas of the Midwest and south were still living (at least) 20 years in the past, and we would see old drug stores and pharmacies with NOS enema gear left from their heyday. Had I known what I know now, I would have bought up all that vintage stuff and sold it to zity members to fund my retirement. As soon as the Internet was ubiquitous in the late 90s, all that stuff was gone from drugstores and on eBay.

After receiving myfirst enemas in the late 40's I can recall seeing displays in UK chemists windows of collections of earthenware bedpans urinals and higginson syringes. However by the mid fifties such displays were very rare though you could still occasionally see higginson syringed and douche bulbs openly displayed

How I wish I had known back when I would view all the great old enema equipment in store windows or better yet on the display shelves, that it would be gone and how I would miss all those black rubber nozzles with the tapered shape and the real rubber red bags with the distinctive rubber fragrance.

During the 1950's and early 1960's in our small town, there was a popular name chain Pharmacy. It sat on a street corner in the busy part of the downtown business district, diagonal from the hotel and directly across from the Woolworths five and dime on the center street of the downtown business district. The store had two window displays, one on the center street running through the business district and the other on a busy street with clothing stores, banks, barber shops. Foot traffic was heavy from about 7 AM to 8 PM during store hours in the area.

For the time, the center street window display was used to present products mostly of interest to women, such as Kotex and Modess along with names like Massengill and Lysol douche concentrates and powders. The popular center street cafe next door hung a tarp at the pharmacy/cafe boundary so exiting customers with children would not have to view such sensitive material. Years earlier, the city council and pharmacy operator had agreed to limit display of other feminine hygiene products to the window display on the south facing side window front and to elevate displays of fountain syringes, enema products etc to prevent small children from being able to see such deeply personal products. But the fireworks went off in 1955 when not only did the pharmacist hang a printed poster for KY Jelly, but also placed an actual tube of KY in the window. The poster was printed locally at the request of the pharmacist and displayed "Ask the pharmacist inside for information where you can get your prescription for KY Jelly?" It was not until circa 1970 that KY was sold over the counter without a prescription.

There were typically a dozen or more variants of enema and douching rubber goods on display. A few of the girls in school when dating, would deliberately pause at the display, and comment on which of the products were better. Their goal was to make their companion turn beet red and many of the sinister sisters were successful at it.

@Victoria1951 I find it interesting that KY jelly was a prescription drug. I understand that, back then, depending on the state, contraceptives were prohibited, or in a grey zone, or available to married women only. But KY is not a contraceptive..

I find it interesting that KY jelly was a prescription drug. I understand that, back then, depending on the state, contraceptives were prohibited, or in a grey zone, or available to married women only. But KY is not a contraceptive..

KY Jelly was originally developed for and marketed to the medical profession circa 1905's. The manufacturer was a pharmaceutical company with a line of suture products. My general impression is the goal was to provide a safe lubricant with no oily residue that would allow surgeons to insert instruments and tools like forceps.

It is not clear when its utility in intimacy was realized but given the other choices of the time, one does not have to stretch the imagination to visualize that the female dominated nursing profession quickly realized its potential.

The odd part of this is the FDA did not officially define the difference between OTC and prescription medications until 1951. Thus it is not clear if a hodgepodge of state statutes led to KY being a prescription product. The requirement for a prescription may have arisen from the Comstock Act of 1873 that prohibited the mailing or transportation of contraceptives. Some states enacted their own variants of the act, with the state laws being more restrictive. It was not until a 1965 US Supreme Court ruling that the Comstock act was essentially ended.

States like Massachusetts and Connecticut had laws that were even more specific on what rubbers goods were classed as contraceptives. The state's inclusion of rubber douche supplies, apparently spawned the weird disclaimer in Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward catalogs of the 1950's till the early 1960's serving notice to customers, fountain syringe, bulb syringe and similar product could not ship to the states referenced above.

I grew up in the Southern United States and can remember when I used the bathroom at Filling Stations when my father stopped to buy gas. The station had two or three condom vending machines in the men's room. This was circa nineteen fifty five, and most gas stations had condom vending machines in the men's bathroom. I can also recall being with him at the drugstore when he purchased condoms. However, there he had to go to the Pharmacist and ask for them by name. By the time I got out of service in the late sixties, they were beginning to be available over the counter in stores, like they were on Military Bases.

Actually, I think KY goes back to 1904, but wasn’t available as a personal lubricant until 1917, whereas petroleum jelly lubricant dates back to the late 1800s. Feel free to fact check.