you see a commercial promoting a swanky
new gadget
and you just gotta have it your favorite
celebrity endorses a product
you're not exactly sure what it is but
you gotta get your hands on it too
right now is station wagon savings time
in the west
shopping can be one of the most fun
pastimes
and there was even a time when shopping
was good for you
in fact it could have saved your life
in the 19th century americans had a
different
concept of what it meant to be clean
they often didn't have running water
they didn't have flush toilets
and you don't have easy running water
the kind of cleanliness
you can attain is limited
so people would wash in a basin they
might use
some soap that grandma had made with
some why
but they did not have an easy time of it
keeping their bodies or their homes
clean and they certainly didn't have
shelves full of products designed to
help them stay hygienically
pure basically life for many people was
just
dirty but starting around the 1820s
people start realizing that living in
filth wasn't so good for their health
infectious diseases began to go up in
number in
the united states in the 1800s
particularly in large cities
then scientific evidence started showing
that microscopic organisms
or germs often found in dirty homes and
cities were the cause of disease
this acceptance of the germ theory of
disease
was slow to calm because
it depended on a belief that
something you couldn't see was making
you sick
oddly enough enthusiasm for the germ
theory
did not come from the medical profession
but
from advertisers of products
the commodification of the germ theory
of disease kind of came in two ways
the first phase was in the 1880s
and into the 1890s around
toilets because of diseases like cholera
and typhoid
public health authorities realized was
spread by fecal matter from sick people
going into drinking water i know it's
really disgusting but that is what was
happening
some of the early products that were
sold to protect people from those germs
included water filters and plumbing
innovations
some really fancy ones too phase
two follows research that shows the
spread of germs through personal contact
coughing spitting sneezing
they realize that that person-to-person
contact
is significant in the spread
of very deadly diseases
advertisers jumped on this and use those
concerns to sell
furniture when you look at
interior decorating in this time period
you can see a massive ship
away from the victorian to a more clean
kind of style so instead of buying a
velvet chair
you would want to buy a wicker chair
that could be
more easily cleaned you would want to
have hardwood floors
and not carpets that couldn't be taken
out because the rugs were very very bad
rugs that you could not take out and be
very very bad of course when you have
all this swanky new furniture
you have to make sure it's clean and
germ free and
advertisers were more than ready to sell
their cleaning products
and they sold them just about any way
they could
even by co-opting someone's name
listerine antiseptic the most widely
used antiseptic in the world
kills germs instantly listerine is named
after
joseph luster who was a surgeon who
really cut down on
post surgery infections so
if you were going to name a product
after someone
blister was a good choice he had no
control over this
those were the days when you could
appropriate someone's name
without asking them so overnight the
lister name went from hospitals
to store shelves to ward off cold
sparkle with that listerine
and protect yourself there was
nothing in your life that listerine
couldn't be used to make better
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advertisers also targeted people's
insecurities
often within the cultural norms of that
time to sell their products
claiming for instance that their
mouthwash could help you with your
social life
poor marge she'll never hold a man until
she does something about her breath
and people totally bought it
advertisers also caught the eye of a
group more genuinely geared toward the
public interest
our public health educators see
that advertising is becoming a potent
way
to get people to buy certain products
so let's adapt the tactics of this new
advertising
which reduced the amount of words and
started to use
graphics pictures line drawings to draw
the eye
in they also used catchy slogans jingles
protection can be yours when you imunize
any of the advertisers methods to sell
ideas and behaviors
between the public health authorities
and the product advertisers
they did a pretty good job getting the
concept out there
that the basic cause of infectious
diseases
were these microbes
this media revolution and consumer
revolution
occurred simultaneously with this
scientific and public health revolution
it develops in other countries as well
but the united states is
really one of the great purveyors of
this
advertising designed to get people to
buy products
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advertising agencies the beginnings of
madison avenue
all day from the same decades that the
germ theory was
coming to be accepted by selling
cleaning products
furniture and toilets advertisers helped
make homes cleaner
and moved the needle in improving public
health
all while making a buck
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you