Trade Card for Tanglefoot Sticky Fly Paper, O. & W. Thum Co., circa 1900

In this trade card advertising Tanglefoot flypaper as "a boon to invalids," a frail patient is saved from further disease and annoyance by the strip of flypaper on her bed, bristling with dead flies. During the turn-of-the-century heyday of America's interest in newly discovered germ theory, Tanglefoot advertised that their nontoxic flypaper (as opposed to common arsenic flypaper) caught "the germ with the fly."