Ayerst began to market Premarin in the 1950s as a treatment for menopausal symptoms, a campaign greatly enhanced in the 1960s by the publication of Feminine Forever, a hyperventilating bestseller written by New York gynecologist Robert Wilson.3 The book promised youth, beauty, and a full sex life for menopausal women through the use of estrogen. Wilson’s son Ronald later told reporter Gina Kolata at the New York Times that Ayerst had paid all of his father’s expenses for writing the book and financed his father’s organization, the Wilson Research Foundation.
