With so many people lately consumed by the TV show Mad Men, it’s worth taking a look back to what the real mad genius ad men of the 1950s and ’60s were cooking up in their ginsoaked three-martini lunch and evening highball pickled cerebral cortexes: insane pharmaceutical ads that took DuPont’s famous Better Living Through Chemistry slogan to heart, and went from there off the deep end with the belief that we can control the uncontrollable with the proper chemical flavor.

More vintage pharmaceutical ads: Psychiatric Drugs: A History in Ads; Japanese Pharmaceutical Ad Gallery; Truly Marvelous Mental Medicine: Thorazine shuffle.)