“Not a cough in a carload:” Images from the Tobacco Industry’s Campaign to Hide the Hazards of Smoking
posted by Frank Pasquale
In 2005, Stanford’s Humanities Center hosted the conference called “Agnotology: The Cultural Production of Ignorance, which included papers like “Manufacturing Uncertainty: Contested Science and the Protection of the Public’s Health & Environment” and “Deny, Deny, Deny: How to Sow Confusion over Climate Change.” Now Stanford Medical School is hosting a fascinating collection of ignorance-generating advertising entitled “Not a cough in a carload:” Images from the Tobacco Industry’s Campiaign to Hide the Hazards of Smoking.
The collaboration of doctors in the ad campaigns is one of the most surprising aspects of the exhibit:
One technique used by the tobacco industry to reassure a worried public was to incorporate images of physicians in their ads. . . . The images were always of an idealized physician, wise, noble, and caring, who enthusiastically partakes of the smoking habit. Little protest was heard from the medical community . . . perhaps because the images showed the profession in a highly favorable light . . . . This genre of ads regularly appeared in medical journals such as JAMA, an organization which for decades collaborated closely with the industry.
The industry made some health claims for cigarettes; they were deemed better than sweets, and therefore “dentist recommended.” Camel claimed that “you can smoke as many Camels as you want, their costlier tobaccos never jangle your nerves.” And a calmed Rock Hudson appears in an ad claiming that, without Camels, “you may yip like a terrier” with anxiety. It’s fun to compare the 1930s to 1950s ads with the sleek corporate style depicted in the documentary Helvetica.
December 22, 2008 at 6:13 pm
Posted in: First Amendment, Health Law
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Responses (2)
MJG - December 22, 2008 at 11:16 pm
The pilot episode of the show Mad Men has some enjoyable scenes recounting this. One character even jokingly notes that “I know I slept better knowing that doctors smoke.”
A.W. - December 29, 2008 at 8:56 am
Sheesh. Okay, here is the truth. EVERYONE KNEW TOBACCO WAS BAD FOR YOU. We are not infants who needed the government to tell us. We all knew. And this notion that “gee, i had no idea” is just a lawyer’s invention.
Ditto with addiction. In this context addiction means “gee, i really like doing this.” Well, duh, which is why people do something they know is bad for them.
Can we stop coddling the plaintiff’s bar and tell the truth? This is just a confluence of greedy trial lawyers and nanny state liberalism. And I am sick to death of this manufactured outrage.
And I say that as someone who doesn’t smoke, who doesn’t profit from smoking in any tangential way (unless you count the fact i work for a health care company). But the fact is smokers put a gun to their own heads for years, and i am sick and tired of people pretending otherwise.
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