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Bulletin of the History of Medicine 74.3 (2000) 659-660



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Book Review

Medicine Ave.: The Story of Medical Advertising in America


William G. Castagnoli, Frank Hughes, John Kallir, Michael J. Lyons, and Ron Pantello. Medicine Ave.: The Story of Medical Advertising in America. Huntington, N.Y.: Medical Advertising Hall of Fame, 1999. xiii + 114 pp. Ill. $60.00.

Pharmaceutical advertising in the United States began in 1708 with the publication of a notice in the Boston News-Letter for Daffy's Elixir Salutis, a treatment for a variety of ailments offered at the fairly stiff price of four shillings six pence for a half-pint bottle. Promotional expenditures grew remarkably over the next two hundred years, primarily for proprietary medicines whose names and virtues appeared not only in newspapers and magazines but also on billboards, barn walls, the brick sides of urban buildings, and even large boulders at tourist attractions such as Niagara Falls. Such excesses could only prompt public outcries, [End Page 659] and they became major contributors to the passage of the Pure Food and Drugs Act in 1906.

Even in the late nineteenth century a portion of this advertising was directed to physicians, with firms such as Lilly, Wyeth, Upjohn, Parke-Davis, Squibb, and Sharp & Dohme, among others, limiting their black-and-white journal advertisements to this group exclusively. Just prior to the 1906 Act the American Medical Association established its Council on Pharmacy and Chemistry, whose standards quickly separated advertisers into independent camps, with "ethical" firms continuing to devote their attention to the professions. The burgeoning of product discoveries beginning in the late 1930s--sulfonamides, antibiotics, oral contraceptives, cardiovascular agents, anti-inflammatories, cholesterol reducers--and, more recently, developments in biotechnology, contributed to the steady growth of pharmaceutical sales in the United States, from $1.3 billion in 1954 to $54.8 billion in 1994.

So also did specialized medical advertising agencies, which began when Henry Phibbs, prodded by Morris Fishbein (then on the staff of the Journal of the American Medical Association), opened the first such firm in 1921. It is the growth of these agencies, as well as of in-house advertising departments of major pharmaceutical firms in the United States, that is chronicled in this handsomely printed and well-illustrated book. The concentration is on activities from the end of World War II until the present day, and Medicine Ave. is thus not really "the Story of Medical Advertising in America," as its title would indicate, but rather a list of people, events, and products of the recent past. It neither reviews nor analyzes the many developments made in pharmaceutical advertising prior to the late 1940s, and it makes no use at all either of earlier studies of advertising or of recent scholarship in the field by Jackson Lears, Michele H. Bogart, and others. However, the contributions made over the last forty years by key figures in pharmaceutical advertising--Arthur Sudler, Arthur M. Sackler, L. W. Frohlich, Paul Klempner, and Matthew J. Hennessey--are valuable, as is having in one place the 113 reproductions of representative examples of journal inserts and direct-mail pieces for leading pharmaceutical specialties, along with information on the agencies, art directors, and copywriters who created many of the pieces illustrated. The comparison of these often striking print advertisements with the notice for Daffy's Elixir Salutis more than 250 years earlier shows that we have indeed come a long way.

William H. Helfand
New York

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