Suzanne M. Fischer, University of Minnesota

In the early twentieth century, scientific medicine, particularly the discoveries of the new experimental therapeutics, was lauded and popularized in American newspapers, popular periodicals, and medical journals.  The new drugs, such as 1911’s syphilis “magic bullet,” Salvarsan, required a new administration method: intravenous (IV) injection, a procedure requiring a special needle and earlier used only by surgeons. “Most physicians…are too timid to use the intra-venous medicine…These practitioners should be avoided and even shunned…” thundered an Oklahoma City men’s specialist, an irregular practitioner who treated venereal and chronic diseases.  Such sentiments, expressed in advertising materials, told the public that scientific doctors, those that used IV injection, were the best doctors to patronize.

In this paper I argue that due to this conflation of IV injection with scientific medicine the syringe became the visual representation of scientific medicine in the early twentieth century U.S.  Men’s specialists’ ubiquitous advertisements depicted doctors using the needle or simply the needle itself to symbolize their scientificness and expertise.   Using 1910s men’s specialist newspaper and pamphlet advertising for Salvarsan, as well as period packaging of drugs and needles, as exemplars, I analyze the visual stories advertisers told the public about scientific medicine.