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Nancy Tomes, Ph.D. |
Why was such advertising considered unethical prior to the 1980s? Why did that resistance crumble? What impact has “direct-to-consumer” advertising had on the doctor-patient relationship? Why does it remain so controversial today?
These questions and others will be the focus of the eighth annual Richard B. Davis, M.D., Ph.D. History of Medicine Lecture, as Nancy Tomes, Ph.D., speaks on “Medicine & Madison Avenue: Pitching Drugs to Patients — and Doctors.”
The lecture will be held at noon on Monday, April 4, in the Eppley Science Hall Amphitheater and will be hosted by the McGoogan Library of Medicine. (Box lunches will be available starting at 11:30 a.m.)
Dr. Tomes, a Distinguished Professor of History at Stony Brook University in the State University of New York (SUNY) system, will look at the history of advertising prescription drugs directly to consumers, providing insight into the complicated and contradictory meanings assigned to the role of “consumerism” in American medicine.
Dr. Tomes’ new book is “Remaking the American Patient: How Madison Avenue and Modern Medicine Turned Patients into Consumers.” She is the author or co-author of several other medical history books, including, “A Generous Confidence: Thomas Story Kirkbride and the Art of Asylum Keeping,” “Madness in America: Cultural and Medical Perceptions of Mental Illness Before 1914,” and “The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women and the Microbe in American Life.”
In collaboration with Duke University Library’s Special Collections, she developed “Medicine and Madison Avenue,” a website on the history of health-related advertising. Her research has been supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Library of Medicine, the National Humanities Center, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Institute for Mental Health.