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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 7526

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

 

Publication type: Journal Article

Tone A.
From naughty goods to Nicole Miller: medicine and the marketing of American contraceptives.
Cult Med Psychiatry 2006 Jun; 30:(2):249-67
http://www.springerlink.com/content/cl66rl166722m555/


Abstract:

In the rich history of modern pharmaceutical advertising in the United States, few medical objects have been as controversial as contraceptives. Condemned in the 1870s as lascivious devices whose commercial visibility would tarnish female sexual purity, contraceptives have in the late twentieth century been repackaged by pharmaceutical companies as the smart, progressive, and fashion-conscious woman’s ally. This article explores evolving perspectives on the place of birth control in public spaces from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. In so doing, it elucidates the changes and continuities in the long and contested history of marketing, medicine, sexuality, and reproductive control.

Keywords:
Advertising/history Commerce/history* Contraceptive Agents/history* Drug Industry/history History, 19th Century History, 20th Century Humans Marketing/history* Sexual Behavior/psychology United States

 

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Cases of wilful misrepresentation are a rarity in medical advertising. For every advertisement in which nonexistent doctors are called on to testify or deliberately irrelevant references are bunched up in [fine print], you will find a hundred or more whose greatest offenses are unquestioning enthusiasm and the skill to communicate it.

The best defence the physician can muster against this kind of advertising is a healthy skepticism and a willingness, not always apparent in the past, to do his homework. He must cultivate a flair for spotting the logical loophole, the invalid clinical trial, the unreliable or meaningless testimonial, the unneeded improvement and the unlikely claim. Above all, he must develop greater resistance to the lure of the fashionable and the new.
- Pierre R. Garai (advertising executive) 1963