Instructor: Judy Segal
Section: 005
Term: 2
Meets: Wednesdays 2:00-4:00pm
This is a course, in the first instance, in rhetoric: it examines strategies of persuasion within social and cultural contexts. Its topic is pharmaceutical marketing over time, and it addresses the relation between advertising discourse, on the one hand, and the consumer of health and health products, on the other. It begins with an examination of rhetorical strategies used by marketers of patent medicines in the 1870’s, when no literate household was without a comprehensive domestic health guide, and when most treatment decisions were made at home, without the aid of doctors.
A lot has been said in the past several years, in both the public press (broadly defined) and scholarly literature, about the well-informed and newly-empowered health consumer, a rational agent with Internet access and choices to make. The self-determining, engaged, health subject is, however, not a new character on the scene of health and medicine. So, in part, this course takes a look at the rhetorical ancestors of the contemporary health subject and considers how that health subject was made. It focuses, for example, on the form that so much patent-medicine advertising took in the 19th Century: the testimonial, typically—an illness narrative with a healthy resolution enabled by a pharmaceutical product. That is, the contemporary health consumer is not an ahistorical free agent, empowered by the endless information she can access with her keystrokes; rather, she is the descendant of a character in a historical narrative that has her already poised to accept a particular sort of health intervention.
We will have access to a range of primary advertising material, as well as research across periods and disciplines on topics of pharmaceutical marketing, styles of prescription, pharmaceutical values, the relation of pharmaceuticals and diagnoses, and, recently, medical over-treatment (often the result of over-screening and the discourse of risk). Our course will focus on the contribution rhetorical scholars make to an increasingly public conversation about drugs.
Required Reading:
Readings will be available online, or in a course packet, or in PDF’s made available to students at no charge. The following list indicates the type of readings the course will gather. Where books are listed, only an excerpt will be assigned.
- Adams, Samuel Hopkins. The Great American Fraud: Articles on the Nostrum Evil and Quacks. New York: P.F. Collier & Son, 1906.
- Angelmar, Reinhard, Sarah Angelmar, and Liz Kane. “Building Strong Condition Brands.” Journal of Medical Marketing 7.4 (2007): 341-250.
- Belling, Catherine. A Condition of Doubt: The Meanings of Hypochondria. Oxford UP, 2012.
- Cassels, Alan. Seeking Sickness: Medical Screening and the Misguided Hunt for Disease. Greystone Books, 2012.
- Conrad, Peter, and Valerie Leiter. “From Lydia Pinkham to Queen Levitra: Direct-To-Consumer Advertising and Medicalisation.” Sociology of Health and Illness 30.6 (2008): 825-838.
- Emmons, Kimberly. Black Dogs, Blue Words. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010.
- Healy, David. Pharmageddon. University of California Press, 2012.
- Kallet, Arthur, and Frederick John Schlink. 100,000,000 Guinea Pigs: Dangers in Everyday Foods, Drugs, and Cosmetics. New York: Vanguard Press, 1933.
- Koerber, Amy. Breast or Bottle? Contemporary Controversies in Infant-Feeding Policy and Practice. South Carolina UP, 2013.
- Kopelson, Karen. “Writing Patients’ Wrongs: The Rhetoric and Reality of Information Age Medicine.” Journal of Advanced Composition 29 (2009): 353- 404.
- Kravitz, Richard L., et al. “Influence of Patients’ Requests for Direct-to-Consumer Advertised Antidepressants: A Randomized Controlled Trial.” JAMA 293.16 (2005): 1995-2002.
- Segal, Judy Z. “What, in Addition to Drugs, Do Pharmaceutical Ads Sell?” In Joan Leach and Deborah Dysart-Gale, eds., Rhetorical Questions of Health and Medicine. Lexington Books, 2010.
- Van Graef Medical Company. A Private Treatise Addressed to Youth, Manhood and Old Age on the Diseases of the Nervous and Sexual System, Showing these Formidable Disorders to Be Curable in All Their Stages. New York: Van Graef Medical Company, 1888. Print.
- Young, James Harvey. The Toadstool Millionaires: A Social History of Patent Medicines In America before Federal Regulation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961. Print.
Course requirements:
Seminar paper and presentation: 40%
Take-home exam: 40%
Seminar participation: 20%
Register here: https://courses.students.ubc.ca/cs/main?pname=subjarea&tname=subjareas&req=5&dept=ENGL&course=489§ion=005
