Lentacker, Antoine (Author)
Merriman, John M. (Advisor)
Yale University
Merriman, John M.
Physical Details: 370 pp.
Language: English
In Europe, the decades around 1900 were a time of radical transformations in the production and consumption of both drugs and media. Signs and Substances is about the links between these two developments. Focusing on France and Austria, I demonstrate that up to one tenth of the printed surface of the major newspapers of the time was dedicated to the advertising of drugs, a share no other commodity could claim. Drugs figured centrally in the economy of the emerging mass press, while newspapers, in combination with the mail, loosened the hold of physicians and pharmacists on the dispensation of medicines and medical advice. In France, I show, this led to the formation of a drug market in which virtually any substance could be freely produced, openly promoted, and sold directly to the public until well into the interwar years. In Austria, by contrast, it gave rise to a clandestine market in which illicit products were procured by mail from Germany or Hungary. Comparing both countries, I seek to understand how trust in drugs was produced and maintained in the context of markets founded largely on secrecy, forgery, and unverifiable claims. My method is to study drugs through the paper technologies used to produce, organize, and disseminate information about them. Drugs' powers are both intensely desired and irremediably elusive. As a result, drugs cannot circulate unless accompanied by some set of signs, whether textual or visual, that reveal their otherwise invisible properties. Alongside newspapers, posters, pamphlets, and the mail, which served to undermine professional monopolies on the drug trade, I also devote attention to the changing uses of prescriptions, formularies, and medical journals, which served to reassert these monopolies as national health insurance expanded in the interwar years. My concern throughout is with the powers and failures of print to build credit and manage uncertainty, which I analyze in an effort to grasp how mass-production altered the conditions of trust in both things and words. Studied in this way, drugs raise a number of fundamental questions for the history of science, critical media studies, and transnational European history: What are publics and how is their formation related to that of markets? How do certain media acquire and lose their powers? How is authoritative knowledge made and received? What are the roles of publicity and secrecy in the creation of industrial and professional monopolies? And how did the state become involved in sorting truths from lies in therapeutic matters, making medical speech one of the most strictly policed? By addressing the consequences of the revolution of the mass periodical and exploring the tools and strategies devised at the time to cope with the runaway proliferation of medical information, my research also suggests ways to think historically about the consequences of new media on our own contemporary ways of guaranteeing access to pharmaceuticals and pharmaceutical knowledge.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Article
Livio Oggero;
(2019)
Storia del talco e delle miniere della Val Germanasca
(/isis/citation/CBB818702106/)
Book
Canel, Annie;
Oldenziel, Ruth;
Zachmann, Karin;
(2000)
Crossing boundaries, building bridges: Comparing the history of women engineers, 1870s--1990s
(/isis/citation/CBB000110571/)
Book
John Wall;
(2018)
Streamliner: Raymond Loewy and Image-making in the Age of American Industrial Design
(/isis/citation/CBB798894979/)
Article
Meyer, Carrie A.;
(2013)
The Farm Debut of the Gasoline Engine
(/isis/citation/CBB001320819/)
Chapter
Thompson, C. Michele;
(2005)
French Colonial Medicine and Pharmacology in Indo-China, 1802--1954
(/isis/citation/CBB000774980/)
Book
Jones, Claire;
(2013)
The Medical Trade Catalogue in Britain, 1870--1914
(/isis/citation/CBB001202367/)
Article
Maddalena Cataldi;
(2016)
Inventing the Menton Man. Rivière's Discovery as Reflected in the French Media
(/isis/citation/CBB346994538/)
Article
Bonnemain, Bruno;
(2009)
Les périodiques médicaux financés par l'industrie du médicament: une histoire de plus d'un siècle
(/isis/citation/CBB000933425/)
Article
Tomes, Nancy;
(2005)
The Great American Medicine Show Revisited
(/isis/citation/CBB000800009/)
Book
Anat Rosenberg;
(2022)
The rise of mass advertising : Law, enchantment, and the cultural boundaries of British modernity
(/isis/citation/CBB089807670/)
Article
Maxime Poulain;
(2022)
Ocean-Liner Ceramics: A Red Star Line Assemblage in Antwerp, Belgium
(/isis/citation/CBB033075091/)
Book
West, Nancy Martha;
(2000)
Kodak and the Lens of Nostalgia
(/isis/citation/CBB000501918/)
Book
Treu, Martin;
(2012)
Signs, Streets, and Storefronts: A History of Architecture and Graphics along America's Commercial Corridors
(/isis/citation/CBB001213383/)
Article
Kinini, Angélique;
(1997)
Genèse de la toxicomanie dans l'imaginaire romantique et médical (1800-1860): Les étranges alliances des substances hallucinatoires dans le temps et l'espace
(/isis/citation/CBB000077234/)
Article
Martensen, Karin;
(2018)
Mensch und Maschine in den Laboratorien Thomas Alva Edisons. Ein Beitrag zur Technikhistorie aus musikwissenschaftlicher Sicht. (Man and machine in the laboratories of Thomas Alva Edison. A contribution to the history of technology from a musicological point of view.)
(/isis/citation/CBB084582039/)
Book
Chuck Blardone;
(2013)
Pennsylvania Railroad advertising art: featuring the Ed Lied collection
(/isis/citation/CBB807923064/)
Article
Peltier, Bruce;
(2007)
Painless Parker's Legacy: Ethics, Commerce, and Advertising in the Professions
(/isis/citation/CBB001210496/)
Chapter
Simon, Jonathan;
(2008)
French Serum Regulation in 1895: The Necessary Minimum or the Maximum Possible?
(/isis/citation/CBB001221038/)
Article
Hess, Volker;
(2008)
The Administrative Stabilization of Vaccines: Regulating the Diphtheria Antitoxin in France and Germany, 1894--1900
(/isis/citation/CBB000831747/)
Book
James Mussell;
Graeme Gooday;
(2020)
A Pioneer of Connection: Recovering the Life and Work of Oliver Lodge
(/isis/citation/CBB706355835/)
Be the first to comment!