Abstract
Medical products, predominantly sold by newspaper and book printers, became the most heavily advertised branded good throughout the eighteenth century.1 Proprietary medicines were big business and so counterfeits were rife; protecting the brand was crucial. Proprietors aimed to convince consumers of the medicine’s authenticity, its reliability and, on occasion, its safety and efficacy. This was in part achieved in the physical fabric of the product and its packaging, as well as through controlled distribution and marketing of the medicine.2
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Notes
- 1.
J. Styles, ‘Product innovation in early modern London’, Past & Present 168 (2000), 150.
- 2.
J. Basford, ‘“A commodity of good names”: the branding of products, c.1650–1900’ (PhD thesis: University of York, 2012).
- 3.
E. Leong, ‘Making medicines in the early modern household’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 82:1 (2008), 145–168.
- 4.
Basford, ‘A commodity of good names’, 49–51.
- 5.
Reproductions of these fliers appear in P.G. Horman, B. Hudson, and R.C. Rowe, Popular Medicines. An Illustrated History (London: Pharmaceutical Press, 2008), 60–63.
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Basford, J. (2016). ‘Columen Vitae’: Pharmaceutical Packaging, 1750–1850. In: Craciun, A., Schaffer, S. (eds) The Material Cultures of Enlightenment Arts and Sciences. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-44379-3_27
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-44379-3_27
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