Diabetic Bread, Goat’s Milk Formula, Soda, Suntan Lamps, and Cigarettes
Introduction
The decline and fall of printed medical journals was foretold by the turn of the 21st century by the rapid and easy accessibility of online publications. The dramatic decrease in circulation of the printed editions of the major peer-reviewed medical journals has meant that the revenue from advertising has also dropped precipitously. Peer-reviewed journals are those that publish original research articles and commentaries by physicians and other health professionals only after careful review by other experts who make recommendations to the editor about the validity and significance of the articles’ findings and conclusions. The journals whose articles are the most cited by researchers and practicing physicians alike are those with the strongest peer-review process. One of the foremost of these is the Journal of the American Medical Association, or JAMA, which accepts just 11% of the more than 7,000 major manuscripts it receives annually and 4% of the more than 4,400 research papers received. But the paid advertisements for medications and medical devices in JAMA and other journals directed at prescribing physicians do not undergo the same peer review. The pharmaceutical companies must adhere to guidelines set by the Food and Drug Administration, but the advertiser has carte blanche when it comes to the images and slogans used in the ads. This has led to the emergence of adverse reactions not previously identified in the testing of the drugs on a small number of individuals. For example, overenthusiasm in prescribing newly introduced antibiotics in the 1960s and 1970s led to the emergence of resistant strains of bacteria in ensuing decades.
In addition to ads for drugs and medical devices now no longer used and many long forgotten, in the first half of the 20th century JAMA also accepted advertisements for numerous consumer products, including automobiles, infant formulas, sanitariums, vitamins, automobiles, cigarettes, alcohol, hotels, airlines, soda, and goat’s milk. This exhibition features examples of these advertisements from the highest circulation medical journal of the first 60 years of the twentieth century, JAMA, as gleaned from several dozen issues from the 1900s to the 1950s. Such issues of medical journals are rare because when libraries bound them, the advertisements were discarded.
By the 1930s, as cigarette smoking was dramatically increasing among men and women — including physicians — cigarette advertisements were appearing regularly in the JAMA and The New England Journal of Medicine in the U.S. and The Lancet and the British Medical Journal in the United Kingdom. From 1933 to 1953, JAMA accepted cigarette advertisements that encouraged physicians to recommend certain brands to their patients and that touted health benefits for filtered cigarettes and brands with less nicotine. The Center for the Study of Tobacco and Society has several dozen complete issues of JAMA with cigarette advertisements from the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, as well as complete issues of The New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, the Medical Journal of Australia, and other journals with cigarette ads.
This exhibition features over 200 advertisements in JAMA between the 1900s and the 1960s for cigarettes and a host of other products whose manufacturers sought to influence physicians’ prescribing practices and personal consumption habits.
Click the links below to be taken to the corresponding section.
The Early Years | Cigarettes | Alcohol | Hygiene | Insurance | Soda | Medical Equipment | Automobiles | Vacation and Leisure | Hormones | Infant Feeding | All You Can Eat | Citrus | Treatment for Infectious Diseases | All You Can Prescribe | Miscellaneous | Sun Lamps | Sanitariums | Sugar, Sweets, and Sweeteners
