John Rauch
DH 101 DISC 1C
Blog Post 2
This repository holds many images of patented/trademarked medicine trade cards. These cards have been dated in a range from 1870-1906. Essentially, these cards came in a form similar to a baseball trading cards; I assume so they could be passed out to others, which advertised a particular medicine, pill, or elixer that would heal some kind of condition. According to the metadata available for this repository, the patenting of medicine became popular in the United States when the ‘Pure Food and Drug Act’ was passed in 1906. The metadata also shows that cards were either in French, German, or English, meaning that some kind of translation or transcribing may have been necessary to organize the data.
An example of a trade card, description, and web tools for analysis
Based on this archive, I would be able to tell a historical narrative on how modern medicine has evolved from the 20th – 21st Century, and also show the kinds of diseases people were most vulnerable to, and willing to pay money to cure. An investigative aspect could be applied to this narrative paper, by researching if these diseases in the tradecards even existed, and if the cure was more than just ‘snake oil’. I believe an artist could also examine these cards to understand how mainstream art looked during this time, in this category, and in that country. A publicist or media design student may look at these cards to understand the types of advertisement strategies used and bring that into a story about how our values have changed and what society finds appealing now versus then.
You would not be able to tell a detailed story about the medical practices of a region or time. So any kind of instructional or encyclopedia writing would be very difficult to accomplish given this archive. This is because many of the documents and images scanned are in another language, and only contain a snippet of medical information from the specific time and place. While the metadata for each image is impressive and informative in describing that particular document, there is not enough information to go on to provide a systematic and detailed description of the overall state of a health care.
I believe this archive could remedy this inability of detailed writings by providing links to other websites or books that talk about this particular document in more detail. By this I mean linking names to wikipedia articles about that person, or linking locations to maps. If a disease or cure is the focus of the tradecard, they could be linked to other resources that talk more specifically about them. Overall, I think the website does its purpose very well, which is why I recommend that they only link this metadata to other places that have more expertise in that field, instead of trying to incorporate this information in their archive and risk providing an ‘information overload’ to its viewers.