DC -- Natl Museum of American History -- Exhibit: More Doctors Smoke Camels: A Close Reading of Historical Advertising:
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Description of Pictures: More Doctors Smoke Camels: A Close Reading of Historical Advertising
April 5, 2019 – TBD
Despite today’s common knowledge that tobacco products cause cancer, advertisers from the 1920s to the 1960s used representations of medical professionals to make the case that smoking was healthy. The exhibit examines these period advertisements by tobacco companies seeking to exploit the influence of doctors, dentists, and nurses to ease consumers’ anxiety over the health risks of smoking. Contemporary audiences will learn how advertisers worked to promote cigarettes in the face of the health problems they caused.
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Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.
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Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
CAMELS_190410_015.JPG: Trust Me, I'm a Doctor
When the surgeon general released a report on the dangers of smoking in 1964, around 42% of Americans, doctors among them, regularly smoked. And they were sold tobacco products through countless magazine, newspaper, radio, and television ads. Many of those ads featured fictional medical professionals touting the relative healthfulness of one brand over another and making the act seem perfectly healthy by smoking themselves.
CAMELS_190410_019.JPG: Anatomy of an Ad
CAMELS_190410_024.JPG: Advertisers used doctors to try to convince consumers that smoking wasn't unhealthy.
CAMELS_190410_093.JPG: Did Doctors Mind?
Some individual doctors complained about the use of doctors in tobacco advertisements, but medical organizations did not raise serious objections. They were influenced in part by money flowing to medical societies through tobacco advertising in their journals.
CAMELS_190410_096.JPG: Could Smoking Be Marketed as Healthy?
CAMELS_190410_101.JPG: Could Smoking Be Marketed as Healthy?
Even before the 1964 surgeon general report that linked smoking to cancer and heart disease, smokers worried about the health effects of using tobacco products. Tobacco users complained about "throat irritation" and "smoker's cough." Some even called cigarettes "coffin nails," implying they would put smokers into an early grave. The tobacco industry was worried about this threat to their business, so they set out to allay fears of worried smokers.
CAMELS_190410_103.JPG: Why Use Doctors in Ads?
CAMELS_190410_118.JPG: "More Doctors Smoke Camels"
From 1927 to 1952, advertisers used doctors to sell consumers on a product later proven to be dramatically unhealthy: cigarettes.
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2019 photos: Equipment this year: I continued to use my Fuji XS-1 cameras but, depending on the event, I also used a Nikon D7000.
Trips this year:
a four-day jaunt to Massachusetts (Boston, Stockbridge, and Springfield) to experience rain in another state,
Asheville, NC to visit Dad and his wife Dixie,
four trips to New York City (including the United Nations, Flushing, and the New York Comic-Con), and
my 14th consecutive San Diego Comic-Con (including sites in Utah).
Number of photos taken this year: about 582,000.
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