The Wasp — 1889 — page 440: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

This page is **primarily advertising**, not satire or political commentary. It contains two distinct sections: 1. **Top half**: Business listings for Sherwood & Sherwood (importers and commission merchants) with offices in San Francisco, Portland, and Los Angeles, advertising imported liquors, groceries, and various commercial products. 2. **Bottom half**: A large advertisement for "Wm. Radam's Microbe Killer," a patent medicine. The ad features a trade-mark logo showing a figure fighting disease and makes sweeping health claims—"curing people by the thousands" and calling it "the most valuable remedy known." This represents a typical late-19th-century medical quackery advertisement, though presented as serious commercial content rather than satire. The page demonstrates *The Wasp's* reliance on paid advertising revenue rather than editorial cartoons on this particular issue.