Since the late 1960s, William H. Helfand has donated more than 1,000 posters, prints, and ephemera to the Philadelphia Museum of Art's Ars Medica Collection, the world's only collection of medical prints housed in an art museum. This fascinating volume presents some 50 of the nearly 200 posters in the renowned Helfand Collection, and includes the work of prominent artists such as Jules Chéret and Leonetto Cappiello. Chéret's large, colorful lithographs elevated the commercial placard to the rank of art, while Cappiello's arresting figures revolutionized 20th-century poster design. Additional examples demonstrate the wide range of compositions produced by unidentified artists working in Europe and the United States between the late 19th and 20th centuries. Dating from the mid-19th to the late 20th century, these posters—sometimes strange or startling but most often amusing—address a wide range of topics, including hygiene, medical conferences, and spurious miracle cures.

Health for Sale: Posters from the William H. Helfand Collection

Arts & Photography

Shoemaker, Innis Howe

Ittmann, John

Helfand, William H.

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Yale University Press

The Picture of Health: Images of Medicine and Pharmacy from the William H. Helfand Collection

Philadelphia Museum of Art

Art catalog from the Philadelphia Museum of Art

The Picture of Health: Images of Medicine and Pharmacy

Crowning Achievements: Dentistry in the Ars Medica Collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art

The Nightingale's Song: Nurses and Nursing in the Ars Medica Collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art

This authoritative and entertaining exhibition catalog explores the long visual history of a rich and neglected topic: medical quackery, from the itinerant seller of nostrums four centuries ago to the unsolicited spam of today's internet. Presenting a broad variety of material—prints by William Hogarth and Honoré Daumier, posters by Jules Chéret and Maxfield Parrish, and books by H. G. Wells and S. Weir Mitchell—Quack, Quack, Quack offers a delightful look at the remarkable artistry and elaborate language quacks used to peddle their wares: lavish pronouncements, excessive postures, and imaginatively exalted therapeutic promises. The earliest quacks, we see, dressed elaborately, inflated their credentials, and embraced an extravagant vocabulary to market their panaceas, at times claiming their pills and salves would cure all disease. They were succeeded in short order by the makers of proprietary medicines, many of whom adopted quack-style promotional methods while introducing new ones of their own. These vendors advertised widely—often with celebrity testimonials—publishing broadsides, posters, pamphlets, and manifestos to amplify their claims. And though recent strides in medicine mean that most people avoid quacks, and efforts have been made to rid society of patent-medicine makers, the quack survives to the present day, promising to make us all thinner, better-looking, healthier, or more sexually potent. This catalogue—and the 2002 New York City Grolier Club exhibition it originally accompanied—are fascinating reminders of how long such promises have been with us, and in how many unique and scintillating ways they've been made.

Quack, Quack, Quack: The Sellers of Nostrums in Prints, Posters, Ephemera, & Books

History & Criticism

Winterhouse Editions

Medicine & pharmacy in American political prints, 1765-1870 (Publication - American Institute of the History of Pharmacy (Publication No. 4, New Series)

Medical Books

History

American Institute of the History of Pharmacy

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