2022 Helfand Fellow Presentation - Pharmaceutical Visions: How US Drug Companies and Ad Agencies Revamped Their Credibility by Marketing with Scientific Imagery

At the turn of the twentieth century, the American public saw the rise of large corporate pharmaceutical companies and national advertising. The oversaturation of ads and the unchecked claims of patent medicines spurred muckraking exposés and, eventually, federal regulations. During this period, medical visual culture transformed to portray drug companies as scientific and research-oriented. This talk compares late-nineteenth-century patent medicine trade cards with medical ads in Ladies’ Home Journal in the 1920s, revealing a transition from entertainment and fantasy to a preoccupation with scientific progress and medical authority. The history of pharmacy literature often overlooks the continuity of marketing techniques between patent medicine and subsequent corporate pharmaceutical companies. Bishop argues that in shifting advertising imagery toward scientific and medical authority, drug companies and their ad agencies sought to gain medical credibility and professional clout by associating with the burgeoning prestige of bacteriology and the medical profession. His work contributes to understanding how marketing imagery shapes medical credibility while appealing to customers’ aspirations.

Speaker

Joseph Bishop is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Princeton University, focusing on the American history of science, medicine, and technology. He completed his master’s degree at New York University. His thesis project, “From Shadowgraphy to Radiology: Transitioning Early Hospital X-Ray Machines from Photographers to Physicians,” depended heavily on NYAM’s library collections and won the 2022 Shryock Medal from the American Association for the History of Medicine.