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Summary
This article discusses the intersection of science and culture in the marketplace and explores the ways in which radium quack and medicinal products were packaged and labelled in the early twentieth century US. Although there is an interesting growing body of literature by art historians on package design, historians of science and medicine have paid little to no attention to the ways scientific and medical objects that were turned into commodities were packaged and commercialized. Thinking about packages not as mere containers but as multifunctional tools adds to historical accounts of science as a sociocultural enterprise and reminds us that science has always been part of consumer culture. This paper suggests that far from being receptacles that preserve their content and facilitate their transportation, bottles and boxes that contained radium products functioned as commercial and epistemic devices. It was the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act that enforced such functions. Packages worked as commercial devices in the sense that they were used to boost sales. In addition, ‘epistemic’ points to the fact that the package is an artefact that ascribes meaning to and shapes its content while at the same time working as a device for distinguishing between patent and orthodox medicines.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the IKYDA project of the Greek State Scholarships Foundation and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. I would like to thank Hans-Jörg Rheinberger for his hospitality at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and his inspiring comment that boxes do have a meaning in transferring and marketing radium. To Paul Frame of Oak Ridge Universities in Tennessee I owe a long-distance help in accessing important archival material. His fascinating website on the history of radium products has motivated and inspired a big part of this paper. Joel Lubenau has been influential and exceptionally generous by sharing catalogues of radium products and relevant material. My thanks go also to Ursula Klein for the long discussions on materials, her comments on several versions of the paper, and her overall support. The comments of the two anonymous referees were exceptionally constructive and decisive in reshaping my paper and clarifying my arguments.
Notes
1Daniel Boorstin, The Americans: The Democratic Experience (New York, 1974), 307–58.
2Michael Schudson, Advertising, the Uneasy Persuasion (New York, 1984).
3Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940 (Berkeley, 1985), 64.
4William Leach, Land of Desire. Merchants, Power and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York, 1993), 42.
5Bruno Latour, ‘Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts’, in Shaping Technology, Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change, edited by Wiebe Bijker and John Law (Cambridge, MA, 1992), 151–80.
6John Levi Martin, ‘The Myth of the Consumption Oriented Economy and the Rise of the Desiring Subject’, Theory and Society, 28(3) (1999), 425–53.
7Liz Conor, The Spectacular Modern Woman: Feminine Visibility in the 1920s (Bloomington, 2004). As Conor claims ‘The meaning that accrued to women's visibility in public space situated them in cultural proximity to the commodity spectacle’, 48.
8James Harvey Young, The Medical Messiahs: A Social History of Health Quackery in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, 1967).
9For a very informative overview of the issue of consumption see Sharon Zukin and Jennifer Smith Maguire, ‘Consumers and Consumption’, Annual Review of Sociology, 30 (2004), 173–97. Although advertising is heavily discussed in most of the sited works, packaging has been neglected as a crucial factor in promoting and affecting consumerism.
10Irwin Wolf, ‘Foreword’, in Packaging, Packing and Shipping, edited by James Rice (New York, 1936), vii–viii (vii).
11Egmont Arens, ‘25 Years of Progress in Package Design’, Modern Packaging, March (1952), 152–9.
12‘The Package’, The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art, 27 (1959), 4–39, 4.
13‘The Package’, (note 12), 8.
14Adrian Forty, Objects of Desire: Design and Society 1750–1980 (London, 1986), 6.
15Leo Nejelski, ‘The Consumer as a Package Designer’ in Packaging, Packing and Shipping, edited by James Rice (New York, 1936), 113–16, 113.
16Glenn Porter, ‘Cultural Forces and Commercial Constraints: Designing Packaging in the Twentieth Century United States’, Journal of Design History, 12 (1999), 25–43, 27.
17For example see Yuriko Saito, ‘Japanese Aesthetics of Packaging’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 57 (1999), 257–65; Steven Henry Madoff, Pop Art: A Critical History (Berkley, 1997); Thomas Hine, The Total Package: The Evolution and Secret Meanings of Boxes, Bottles, Cans and Tubes (Boston, 1995); Stanley Sacharow, The Package as Marketing Tool (Radnor, PA, 1982).
18Patricia Gossel, ‘Packaging the Pill’ in Manifesting Medicine: Bodies and Machines, edited by Robert Bud, Bernard Finn and Helmuth Trischler (The Netherlands, 1999), 105–22.
19Elizabeth Siegel Watkins, “‘Doctor Are You Trying to Kill Me?’: Ambivalence about the Patient Package Insert for Estrogen”, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 76 (2002) 84–104. See also Elizabeth Siegel Watkins, The Estrogen Elixir: A History of Hormone Replacement Therapy in America (Baltimore, 2007), ch. 7. For a more general discussion about FDA and the package inserts for patients’ information see Elizabeth Siegel Watkins, On the Pill: A Social History of Oral Contraceptives, 1950–1970 (Baltimore, 1998), 120–8.
20Very little literature exists on the history of packaging in medicine and none in science. A few exceptions are the following: William Hafeland and David Cowen, ‘Evolution of Pharmaceutical Oral Dosages Forms’, Pharmacy in History, 5 (1983), 3–18; Aimee Rhum Tamper Resistant Packaging: What's Ahead? (Stamford, CN, 1984); George Griffenhagen and Mary Bogard, History of Drug Containers and Their Labels (American Institute of the History of Pharmacy, 1999).
21Other indicative examples could be the case of ether (Ursula Klein, ‘Blending Technical Innovation and Learned Natural Knowledge: The Making of Ethers’ in Materials and Expertise in Early Modern Europe, edited by Ursula Klein and Emma Spary (Chicago, 2010), 125–57); the case of hydrogen with immediate application in ballooning (Mi Gyung Kim, ‘Public Science: Hydrogen Balloons and Lavoisier's Decomposition of Water’, Annals of Science, 63 (3) (2006), 291–318); and chlorine used extensively for bleaching in textile industry (Agusti Nieto-Galan, Coloring Textiles: A History of Natural Dyestuffs in Industrial Europe (Dordrecht, 2001)). I would like to thank Ursula Klein for bringing to my attention these other cases of the industrial applications of materials closely related to the history of chemistry. See also Robert Kohler, ‘Science, Foundation and American Universities in the 1920s’, Osiris 3 (1987), 135–64; Gerland Geison's article on Louis Pasteur's strategies for marketing his patents and licenses, Gerald Geison, ‘Organization, Products and Marketing in Pasteur's Scientific Enterprise’, History and Philosophy of Life Sciences, 24 (2002), 37–51. Here Pasteur is presented as a skilled showman and salesman, commercializing several of his patents, his methods and the anthrax vaccine.
22J. H. Young, (note 7), viii.
23Around the 1890s most of the American states increased the qualifications required for physicians licensure and by 1910 the administrative machinery was in place and able to enforce reform to the American medical education. Substandard medical schools were simply denying licensure to their graduates. See Samuel Baker, ‘Physician Licensure Laws in the United States, 1865–1915’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 39, (1984), 173–97.
24Morris Fishbein, History of the American Medical Association (Philadelphia, 1984), 953–54.
25American Medical Association, ‘Nostrums and Quackery: Articles on the Nostrum Evil and Quackery’, reprinted from the Journal of the American Medical Association (Chicago, 1911, first edition), 13–17. A second edition of the volume appeared in 1912 and two more were enriched and republished in 1921 and 1936 respectively. Hale's radium case is presented as occurring in 1895 but this is impossible as radium was only discovered in 1898. Most probably this case occurred in 1906 when the first reference to radium fraud cases appears in the AMA archives.
26The list of Hale's convictions was already too long. A few years earlier he was indicted in Denver for having used the mail in another scheme to defraud. Immediately after he was also convicted in the UK and spent 18 months in prison for a similar fraudulent practise in medicine. On his return to the USA he was convicted once again, this time for the Denver case and sentenced to serve another 18 months in the penitentiary. American Medical Association, (note 23), 13–17.
27For an endless and interesting discussion of such cases see J. H. Young, (note 7). Also James Harvey Young, The Toadstool Millionaires: A Social History of Patent Medicine in America Before Federal Regulation (Princeton, 1961).
28See for example Marc Law's relatively recent study of how actually the FDA enforced regulations and used its authority to control the food and drug industry. As Law argues, the FDA's enforcement strategy did not entail punishment and setting the appropriate fine to firms that violated the law given its small size and weakness in the enforcement provisions of the Act. Instead, the FDA offered benefits to firms who complied with the Act. Marc Law, ‘How do Regulators Regulate? Enforcement of the Pure Food and Drug Act, 1907–38’, The Journal of Law, Economics and Organization, 22 (2), (2005), 459–89.
29For a view of the entire document see http://www.h-net.org/~hst203/documents/pure.html.
30Quoted in J. H. Young, (note 7), 43.
31Bureau of Investigations, ‘Radium as a Patent Medicine’, Journal of American Medical Association, 98 (16), (1932), 1397–1399, 1397.
32All the consequent information about Wells’ case comes from American Medical Association, (note 23), 24–31, 418, 437.
33David Cantor, ‘Introduction: Cancer Control and Prevention in the Twentieth Century’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 81 (2007), 1–38.
34For an interesting approach to quackery and folk medicine concerning cancer see Barbara Clow, Negotiating Disease: Power and Cancer Care, 1900–1950 (Montreal, 2001), ch. 2 and 3. Clow argues that the border between quackery and scientific medicine has never been fixed and there were many practitioners who operated at the very border of regular medicine in contested territory. See also David Cantor's analysis of the competing messages of hope concerning the cure of cancer put out by an alternative practitioner named Harry Hoxsey and his opponents, the accredited regular physicians. The debate between what counts as orthodox medicine and what is labelled as quackery went on throughout the 1950s. David Cantor, ‘Cancer, Quackery and the Vernacular Meanings of Hope in 1950s America’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 61(3), (2006), 324–68.
35American Medical Association, (note 23), 27.
36The relevant literature on radiotherapy has grown vastly. Among the most recent works see: David Cantor, ‘Radium and the Origins of the National Cancer Institute’ in Biomedicine in the Twentieth Century: Practices, Policies, and Politics, edited by Caroline Hannaway (Amsterdam, 2008), 95; Biomedicine in the Twentieth Century: Practice, Policies, and Politics, 147; Charles Hayter, An Element of Hope: Radium and the Response to Cancer in Canada, 1900–1940 (Montreal, 2005); Ornella Moscucci, ‘The “Ineffable Freemasonry of Sex”: Feminist Surgeons and the Establishment of Radiotherapy in Early Twentieth-Century Britain’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 81 (1), (2007), 139–63.
37For a detailed description of medical radium products see Richard Mould, A Century of X-Rays and Radioactivity in M edicine, with Emphasis on Photographic Records of the Early Years (Bristol, 1993). What is rarely known is that several seeds and needles were made of 24 K gold. When radon in this equipment was spent, the golden seeds passed to the hands of goldsmiths who used the cheap gold to make or repair jewelry. It was not until the 1980s that the FDA located 47 rings in the area of New York and Pennsylvania and alarming cases of dermatitis and cell carcinoma made their appearance. See Donald Blaufox, ‘Radioactive Artifacts: Historical Sources of Modern Radium Contamination’, Seminars in Nuclear Medicine, xviii (1), (January 1988), 46–64, 47.
38Eye, ear, nose and throat specialists and dermatologists stored their radium sources in their offices. As a rule, radiologists, surgeons and gynaecologists stored their own sources in hospitals. In the 1950s the Pennsylvania Department of Health surveyed the offices of 54 private physicians practising in the US. The physicists who conducted the research found inadequate storage of radium sources in 44% of all inspections. In some cases physicians stored the sources even in their private homes and in areas frequented by other members of the physician's family. This careless use resulted in unreasonable radiation exposure not only of the physicians but of their relatives and patients as well. Similar surveys were carried out as early as the 1930s. See Thomas Gerusky, Joel Lubenau et al., ‘Survey of Radium Sources in Offices of Private Physicians’, Public Health Reports, 80 (1), (1965), 75–8. On the importance of radium and its value see an interesting account of several adventures to locate lost radium in clinics and elsewhere, R. B. Taft. Radium Lost and Found (Charleston, 1938).
39M. Fishbein, (note 22), 960.
40Nancy Tomes, ‘Merchants of Health: Medicine and Consumer Culture in the United States, 1900–1940’, The Journal of American History, 88 (2), (2001), 519–47.
41‘Radium Drinks’, Time Monday, 11 April 1932, http://www.time.com.
43Ruth deForest Lamb, American Chamber of Horror. The Truth About Food and Drugs (New York 1976), 77.
42As Roger Macklis claims, Bailey purchased purified radium from the American Radium Laboratory and then bottled it in distilled water marking up its price by almost 500%. Macklis Roger, ‘The Great Radium Scandal’, Scientific American, August 1993, 94–9. The list of literature referring to Radithor is long. See for example Paul Frame, Health Physics Historical Instrumentation Collection (Oak Ridge Associated Universities, 1999) http://www.orau.org/ptp/museumdirectory.htm; Ross Mullner, Deadly Glow: The Radium Dial Painters (Washington, 1999), 21–2; R.E. Rowland, Radium in Humans: A Review of U.S. Studies (Argonne National Laboratory/ER–3, UC–408, 1994).
44‘Queries and Minor Notes, Radithor and William J. Bailey’, Journal of American Medical Association, 88 (5), 1927, 343.
45R. Macklis, (note 39), 98.
46D. Blaufox, (note 34).
47Frame, (note 39).
48Bureau of Investigations, (note 28), 1398.
49Mullner, (note 39), 109–118; Radium Drinks, (note 38).
50Rowland, (note 39), 7. Soon after his death the American Medical Association Council on Pharmacy and Chemistry withdrew approval of devices purporting to make waters radioactive, including several brands of radium tonics besides that of Radithor. For more on radioactive solutions for drinking see A. M. Jelliffe, ‘Radium Vita Emanator—an Unusual Potential Radiation Hazard’, British Medical Journal, 2 (1969), 305–6.
51I thank Joel Lubenau for providing a copy of Radium Chemical Company's catalogue published in the 1920s. This catalogue includes Standard Radium Drinking Water and Standard Radium Ampoules for Injection advertised almost side-by-side.
52For more on the Standard Radium Company see Maria Rentetzi, ‘The U.S. Radium Industry: Industrial in-house Research and the Commercialization of Science’, Minerva, 46 (2008), 437–62.
53David Harvie, Deadly Sunshine: The History and Fatal Legacy of Radium (New York, 2005), 119; Frame, (note 39).
54Brian Gee, ‘Amusements Chests and Portable Laboratories: Practical Alternatives to the Regular Laboratory’, in The Development of the Laboratory: Essays on the Place of Experiment in Industrial Civilization, edited by James Frank (New York, 1989), 37–59, 37.
55My thanks to Carsten Reinhardt for highlighting the possible similarities between radium boxes and chemical amusement chests. See also Ernst Homburg, ‘The Rise of Analytical Chemistry and its Consequences for the Development of the German Chemical Profession (1780–1860)’, Ambix, 46 (1999), 1–32; David Knight, ‘Popularizing Chemistry: Hands-on and Hands-off’, HYLE: International Journal for Philosophy of Chemistry, 12 (2006), 131–40.
56Winner's Gifts, Chemicraft Laboratory, The Youth's Companion, 21 October 1920, 94 (43), 643.
57Anke te Heesen, The World in a Box: The Story of an Eighteenth-Century Picture Encyclopedia (Chicago, 2002).
58Fletcher Nina Little, ‘Artists’ Boxes of the Early Nineteenth Century’, American Art Journal, 12 (1980), 25–39.
59W. Hafeland and D. Cowen, (note 19).
60Among the most known was the Konseal apparatus produced by J. M. Grosvenor and Company, Boston founded in 1885. See James Swarbrick and James Boyland, Encyclopedia of Pharmaceutical Technology, (New York, 2004), vol. 2, 1451.
61Many of the radium products discussed here appear in the excellent website maintained by Paul Frame http://www.orau.org/ptp/museumdirectory.htm.
62 Catalog of Radium Applicators, Screens, and Accessories, The Radium Company of Colorado, Denver, 1921, 5.
63 Catalog, (note 59), 35.
64Maria Rentetzi, Trafficking Materials and Gendered Experimental Practices. Radium Research in Early Twentieth Century Vienna (New York, 2008).
65D. Harvie, (note 50), 83.
66Sabin A. von Sochocky, ‘Can't you Find the Keynote?’, American Magazine, 91 (1921), 24–7.
67 Catalog, (note 59), 35.
68Frame, (note 39).
69In a 1913 article it was mentioned that an emanator was able to be built in a music cabinet, a travelling bag, a mantelpiece or a hospital cabinet. S. G. Jordan, ‘Radium Banking: a New Business’, Technical World Magazine, August 1913, 913–17.
70D. Blaufox, (note 43).
71Frame, (note 39).