In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Drug Marketing

  • Introduction
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History of Medicine Drug Marketing
by
Nils Kessel
  • LAST MODIFIED: 17 April 2025
  • DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780197768723-0031

Introduction

The history of drugs and their marketing is a history of boundaries that are constantly crossed, between commerce and science, which are inseparable in pharmaceutical marketing. In this article, pharmaceutical marketing is defined in a broad sense and includes all processes, actors, structures, institutions, and practices, from product development to utilization by end users and the eventual disappearance of the product from the market. In a narrow understanding, drug marketing also constitutes a recent historical process associated with the rise of professionals in charge of advertising and marketing drugs to consumer groups. Although advertisements and even early medical representatives in charge of influencing physicians’ choices existed before the interwar period, the professionalization of marketing as a practice of commerce is particularly important since the 1920s and 1930s. However, drug manufacturers, physicians, pharmacists, journalists, and politicians have discussed the commerce of medicines for a very long time, and thus shaped narratives about drugs and their status as goods, therapeutic instruments, and cures for patients. A particularly powerful narrative has been that of drugs as goods “different from others” because they are used for health. Pharmaceutical markets were to be regulated differently from other consumer markets, and users were either health professionals or patients. Another influential narrative is that of the “therapeutic revolution,” described as a particularly dense moment of time between approximately 1920 and 1970, during which many innovative drugs became available. However, as recent scholarship has pointed out, access to drugs was unequal, and applying the concept of “revolution,” even if not inappropriate, might at least be incomplete to describe social change with regard to new pharmaceuticals in the mid-twentieth century. Marketing practices, separating symbolically mercantile interest from scientific endeavor and therapeutic promise, are crucial for maintaining, reinterpreting, and reinforcing these narratives. For a clearer picture of how the narrow process of drug marketing emerged in the twentieth century, it is necessary to include the broader history of pharmaceutical markets. Research has been characterized by four historiographical approaches. First is the history of pharmacy, which focuses primarily on the subject of pharmacy, pharmacies and, to a certain extent, the pharmaceutical industry. Economic and business historians have analyzed the pharmaceutical industry and its markets, but often without paying much attention to the scientific problems of developing and marketing medicines. Since the late 1990s, drug “trajectories” and “biographies,” often written by sociologists and anthropologists of science and medicine, have started filling this gap. Historians of science and medicine have been inspired by these approaches, as shown by the large number of publications on individual drugs or drug groups under Anthologies and Pharmaceuticals as Consumer Goods and Therapeutic Tools. However, the focus remained centered on Euro-America and on approaches that emphasized elites such as scientists, industrialists, or officials in regulatory institutions. Influenced by research on (post)colonial spaces and subaltern groups, important studies have been added more recently on other geographical areas, on drugs and empires, and on consumer and patient history. However, it is precisely here that the greatest research deficits remain. The author would like to thank the reviewers for helpful comments and Dana Bricken from OUP for support during writing and publication.

General Resources

The history of pharmaceutical marketing has been researched to varying extents. The state of research can be described as good for some products, especially psychotropic drugs, while there are hardly any or no studies available for other medicines. The history of veterinary drug marketing is yet to be written. Scholars and students interested in the history of drug marketing should search largely in the literature on drugs and medical practice, since specific studies on drug marketing and overviews are rare. The selection made here includes mainly scholarship that does directly address the question of drug marketing or provide an important general overview on the history of drugs. Anthologies especially provide the reader with references to more specialized subfields. The history of pharmaceuticals is a field in which many different approaches from history of medicine, economic and social history, and other social sciences meet, rather than a disciplinary subfield in historiography. Since pharmaceutical markets are undoubtedly among the most heavily regulated consumer goods markets, the works on pharmaceutical regulation relevant to marketing are included. Other boundaries include the one between illegal and legal drugs, veterinary and human medicines, colonial and metropolitan health care, and medicines for the Global North and South. Readers more generally interested in the history of drugs can find relevant information in separate Oxford Bibliographies in History of Medicine article The Pharmaceutical Industry and the Growth of Clinical/Biomedical Research.

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