The Development of Scientific Marketing in the Twentieth Century ed. by Jean-Paul Gaudillière and Ulrike Thoms (review)

Pharmaceutical companies today make news for reasons that have little to do with scientific research or “blockbuster” discovery. Valeant had for years driven up its stock price by slashing research costs, hiking drug prices, and merging with foreign firms to lower taxes paid. This business model came crashing down recently when both product pipeline and revenues dried up, forcing its president to step aside. Martin Shkreli, then CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, resigned in late 2015 after he was charged with securities fraud. As CEO, he had boosted the price of Daraprim, the company’s antiparasitic drug, by 5,000 percent, producing howls of public outrage.

It is against such a backdrop that this edited collection by Jean-Paul Gaudillière and Ulrike Thoms takes on added value. While these essays on twentieth-century scientific marketing of drugs in Germany and France don’t deal explicitly with corporate malfeasance à la Shkreli, they provide original and insightful accounts of how pharmaceuticals became a “fully fledged capitalistic industry” (p. 2) through the use of “scientific marketing.” This involved a series of developments: the use of scientific research to create and expand drug markets, the rise of ad agencies specializing in pharmaceutical marketing, greater spending on R&D and clinical trials. By the 1960s, this “therapeutic revolution” had taken root, in which advances in “social and communication sciences” combined with “mobiliz[ing] biomedical research to build drug markets” (p. 6). New areas of knowledge came into being involving doctors’ script-writing habits, epidemiological patterns, and patients’ perceived need. By the 1970s, the medical research and marketing divisions of large pharmaceutical firms very often co-penetrated.

Ten essays, organized into three sections, make up this volume. Nils Kessel downplays the importance of “blockbuster” invention, instead stressing continuity and tradition. Older classes of drugs, even over-the-counter ones, proved economically viable despite meager evidence of clinical effectiveness. Thoms explores the social legitimacy work of pharmaceutical firms, how they fashioned their “ethical” and “scientific” bona fides. This involved, in part, marketing operations becoming more prominent starting in the 1960s, along with the rise of the life-cycle model. In his case study of the antibacterial drug pristinamycin, Quentin Ravelli explores how scientific data, clinical trials, and state regulation all played into competing interests with respect to market realities and public health. Stephan Felder, Gaudillière, and Thoms examine fifty years of advertising in French and German medical journals, starting in the 1920s. Over time, these ads became more laden with imagery, brand logos, and technical information. Christian Bonah analyzes drug advertising films commissioned by Sandoz during the 1960s, highlighting how they visualized the workings of drugs for physicians and fostered a shared sense of cultural capital among pharmaceutical executives, physicians, and artists. Similarly, Anne-Sophie Mazas examines post-1945 print ads and changes over time in information forms, iconography, and symbolic patterns, which fostered new modes of medical narrative. Lisa Malich looks at the marketing of birth control pills in France, highlighting the changing representations of standardization, product safety, and, later, how advertising addressed corporeal variation and consumer distinctiveness. Tricia Close-Koenig and Thoms examine trade journal ads for insulin and enabling devices sold to diabetics, documenting the emergence of a diabetic industry, involving drugs, medical devices, and dietary products. Gaudillière focuses on the antidepressant Ludiomil during the 1970s, showing how biomedical research and scientific marketing reframed the parameters of depression. Finally, Lucie Gerber discusses psychotropic drugs during the 1950s and 1960s, showing how psychopharmacological screening came to articulate new interpretations of depression, in an era when tranquilizers predominated.

While the articles here are mostly well researched and highly engaging from a pharmaceutical history standpoint, I found they often failed to interact with the sizeable field of marketing history. Before World War II, marketing played a...