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Meprobamate is an anti-anxiety medicine marketed under the brand names Miltown and Equanil.

The first drug to be marketed as “a drug for the tensions of the motherhood role,” was Miltown in the ’50s, Dr. Metzl said, followed less than a decade later by Valium.

Each chapter is a neatly packed and well-researched time capsule, and in the early ones we find automats, hi-fi, Miltown pills, mayonnaise.

Since Milton Berle stumped in the 1950s for an antidepressant called Miltown, they’ve been prominent endorsers, from Jack Nicklaus for high blood pressure to Brooke Shields for thin eyelashes to Sally Field for osteoporosis.

In the 1950s and 1960s, psychiatric journals and pharmaceutical advertisements touted tranquilizers such as Miltown and Deprol as treatments for “motherhood problems,” paving the way for the “mother’s little helper” phenomenon that followed.