Medicine and Madison Avenue
This website, created by National Humanities Center, Duke University Library and the State University of New York at Stony Brook, is an online database containing images and text relating to American medical advertising and ephemera.
The project seeks to explore the complex relationship between modern medicine and modern advertising. The database contains over 600 health related advertisements printed in a range of newspapers and magazines from the 1910s to the 1950s.
It also contains contemporary articles and documents, including reports and articles from journals and magazines which place the collection in a broader historical context. It is possible to browse the collection by keyword or search it using the simple or advanced search options. The collections include material relating to household products, over the counter drugs, personal and oral hygiene, vitamins and nutrition, pharmaceutical companies and cigarettes.
The database records include information about the creator of the advertisement, the date it was published and the publication in which it appeared, along with an image of the advertisement. The site also includes a timeline outlining the major developments in medicine and advertising from the 1840s to the 1960s.