Ebling Library, in collaboration with the University of Wisconsin’s Digital Collections (UWDC) recently launched HADES, the Health Advertisements Database from Ebling Sources. HADES consists of advertisements from health sciences journals covering the disciplines of medicine, nursing, pharmacy, hospital management, laboratory management, and the allied health sciences from 1923 to 2007.
From small quarter page industry or manufacturer ads to full page pharmaceutical indication and side effect content, these advertisements offer a window into the clinical, social, economic, political, historical, legal, and cultural aspects of health care for the past several decades. Generally, from the United States, they also include British, French, German, and some non-European publishers.
Looking for ads on contraception, Ethicon sutures, or hypertension therapy? By using the Search or Browse field or Searching Within the Text (the ad’s copy has been optically scanned for searching enhancements) you’ll find extraordinary images and copy. From representations of physicians, nurses and patients at the bedside, to the tendency of contemporary artists to depict mental health concerns with gendered graphics and language, visit HADES. There is no more amazing rabbit hole on the internet.
HADES offers a lens into the evolution of various specialties, like surgery, anesthesiology, gynecology, public health, infectious diseases, pathology and obstetrics; while also representing the evolution of the technology used to produce the type and illustrations. From hand lettering to typewriter fonts to computer generated typefaces, graphic images abound. From commissioned artist paintings for pharmaceutical companies, to high end photographic images, the researchers can see the visual culture surrounding, for example, the portrayal of practitioners and patients within the health care setting.
The textual promotion of a drug, technology, surgical suture, or laboratory rat chow inevitably centers itself in the era it is created in- for example, the WWII era ads for penicillin include images and reference to military language and events, making the advertising “copy” as reveling as the images themselves. HADES will facilitate a mash up of disciplines and social and cultural context that can create an alchemy never before available online. A researchers delight!
The advertisements were collected during Ebling Library’s Transformation Project, when the majority of print journals from Ebling were moved to consortium libraries, off-site storage, or were removed because there was a digital copy available through a vendor’s database. Librarian, Micaela Sullivan-Fowler established that the advertisements were usually not part of the digital copy and she, colleague Amanda Lambert, and a handful of intrepid students removed the advertisements from each journal and ordered them by journal title and date, hoping that the ads themselves could eventually be digitized, indexed, and made available via the UWDC Collections. Special thanks to the UWDC’s Jill Kambs, Karen Rattunde, Steve Dast and Ebling’s indexers Leslie Sabakinu, Alicia Thone, Tori Salaba, and Amanda Fowler, who have made Micaela’s dream come true.
HADES is a multiyear project, and the batches of ads, designated by journal title, will be loaded into the database as the scanning and indexing are slowly completed. Please address questions about the original print advertisements or research uses to History of the Health Sciences/Curator at Ebling Library by emailing: historicalebling@hsl.wisc.edu