In 1889, an Austrian chemist named Gustav Raupenstrauch went into his laboratory to stop a cholera epidemic tearing through Germany, and came out with Lysol. Within a few decades, the same disinfectant hospitals used to annihilate germs was being sold to American wives as the secret to a happy marriage — and used in one of the most intimate ways imaginable.
The ads called her "a jewel of a wife with just one flaw." That supposed flaw? Neglecting what Lysol called "feminine hygiene"; coded language that concealed a much bigger story about contraception.
Born to fight cholera
Cholera spreads through food and water contaminated with human feces, and in 1889 it was killing large numbers of people in Germany. Raupenstrauch's formula hit back hard. Austria's chief sanitary board announced that a 1% solution would annihilate the common bacillus, then added a selling point: "It renders the skin very smooth." The original formula contained compounds called cresols, which can destroy bacterial cell membranes. That's exactly what you want when battling bacteria like cholera. The problem? You don't want to breathe, swallow or apply cresols to your skin, where exposure can risk serious poisoning, coma or even death. Yet in 1893, a New York doctor praised Lysol as nontoxic and recommended it for use in gynecology and obstetrics.
The public found other uses. Lysol killed garden insects and mildew, and by 1911 it had become a common poison of choice for suicide. In 1933, one coroner, who had already held five inquests into Lysol suicides since the beginning of that year, warned that dying this way "involves a time of very great suffering" and was no easy way out.
Then came the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, which killed somewhere between 25 and 50 million people worldwide. Lysol was front and center as a disinfectant of choice, promoted for preventing the spread of disease and widely used in hospitals.
Code words in the cupboard
In the 1930s, Lysol's maker began selling it as a feminine hygiene product. Back then, the phrase didn't mean springtime fresh. It was code for birth control, which was heavily restricted under federal and state laws.
Blame Anthony Comstock. A Civil War veteran turned New York salesman, Comstock was a devout Christian appalled by a city he saw crawling with pornography and prostitution. He fed the police tips for brothel raids, decided that easy birth control was an invitation to lewdness, and founded the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. In 1872 he carried an anti-obscenity bill he had written himself to Congress, complete with a ban on contraception. The Comstock Act passed in 1873, restricting access to contraceptives, and a couple dozen states wrote their own versions. In Connecticut, even married couples could face a year in prison for using birth control in their own homes.
So the ads spoke in code. Sue's husband Tom has gone cold on her, and her doctor tells her, "It's foolish to risk your marriage happiness by being careless about feminine hygiene" — and that Lysol is "far more dependable than salt, soda, or other homemade solutions" when it comes to douching, or rinsing out the vagina. Dependable is an odd word for a cleanser, isn't it? The "germs" Lysol promised to hunt down were really sperm. The couples in the ads were young, attractive and conspicuously childless, and the ads settled the blame ahead of time: "Instead of blaming him if married love begins to cool, she should question herself." Other ads featured no-nonsense European lady gynecologists. Another played directly on women's fears, opening with the anguished line, "I just can't face it again!"
The Great Depression supercharged sales. Another mouth to feed could be a catastrophe, and preventing one was largely left to women. Douching was the most common form of birth control in America until the FDA approved the Pill in 1960, and for those decades the top feminine hygiene product was Lysol.
They knew, and kept selling
It didn't work. A 1933 study found that half or more of the women using Lysol as a contraceptive still got pregnant, and for the rest, nobody could say whether Lysol had anything to do with it. It also burned. By 1911, doctors had found at least five women who died after uterine irrigation, meaning their wombs were flushed with Lysol. In 1912, the American Medical Association's Council on Pharmacy and Chemistry told companies not to advertise disinfectants for use on the genitourinary tract. The recommendation had no teeth, and Lysol's parent company ignored it. The cresols remained in the formula until 1952.
When a woman sued over burns in 1935, the company argued that she must have been allergic. In 1941, it defended itself in another injury suit by pointing at the FDA: the package was labeled the way federal rules required.
For decades, women were encouraged to douche with Lysol, the same disinfectant created to kill bacteria, as a form of birth control. It became America's top "feminine hygiene" product, even though the company knew by the 1930s that it was unreliable as a contraceptive. And the original formula contained cresols, caustic chemicals that could cause serious injury or even death.
The smell of phenol
Then there was abortion. In 1956, the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology described four women hospitalized after illegal abortions in which Lysol had been pumped into the womb. A 32-year-old arrived with a fever of 104 and port-wine-colored urine because her kidneys were shutting down. Her husband finally confessed that they had gone to a doctor for an abortion two days earlier. Within hours she was breathing like the dying, and an autopsy found massive necrosis, or tissue death, in her kidneys and liver. A 28-year-old patient of the same doctor survived, but the dead tissue scraped from her uterus smelled strongly of phenol, then a main ingredient in Lysol. An 18-year-old spontaneously aborted a four-and-a-half-month fetus after being admitted, and doctors found phenol in the fetal and placental tissue.
The medical establishment called Lysol abortions rare. But when they went wrong, the consequences could be catastrophic. By the 1960s, the reported mortality rate for patients who became septic after botched abortions and were admitted to a hospital was 11 to 22 percent. For those whose abortions had been induced with soap or Lysol, the reported death rate was 50 to 66 percent. More case reports followed: one from Buffalo physician Karl Finzer in the Canadian Medical Association Journal in 1961, and another in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1969.
Still in living memory
Once the Pill arrived, Lysol drifted quietly back to bathrooms, kitchens and the festering laundry piles of teenage boys. Then in 2020, President Donald Trump wondered aloud at a White House briefing whether disinfectant could somehow be used inside the body to fight COVID.
The suggestion was widely met with disbelief. But viewed through the strange history of Lysol, it raises an interesting question: Could the idea make some kind of crazy sense to people old enough to remember when a bottle of Lysol might have been tucked away in the bathroom cupboard — and wasn't meant for cleaning the tub?
The lesson fits on a label: Lysol ain't any kind of medicine. Not for anybody, not for any reason.
But it'll do a hell of a job on your bathroom.