Duke University's Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library is pleased to announce the availability of

"Medicine and Madison Avenue" (MMA). MMA is an online database of over 600 health-related advertisements printed in newspapers and magazines between 1911 and 1958, as well as 35 selected historical documents relating to the creation and influence of health-related advertisements. As a new addition to our image resources, Instructor's and Student's Guides are also included, and provide ideas for use of the database in the classroom. This project is a collaboration of the National Humanities Center, the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing History, Duke's Digital Scriptorium, and the State University of New York at Stony Brook. MMA was generously funded by the Ahmanson Foundation.

The purpose of the project is to illustrate the variety and evolution of marketing images from the 1910s through the 1950s of health-related advertisements. The collection represents a wide range of products such as cough and cold remedies, laxatives and indigestion aids, and vitamins and tonics, among others. The images are drawn from the collections of the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing History, with the bulk of the ads originating in the J. Walter Thompson Company's Competitive Advertising File.

An important component of Medicine and Madison Avenue is the inclusion of "Suggestions for Classroom Use." This section contains the Instructor's and Student's Guide, and is written by Nancy Tomes, Professor of History, State University of New York at Stony Brook. The Instructor's Guide aims to help course instructors design effective assignments based on the documents included in MMA. The Student's Guides contain case studies and classroom exercises for use with this database. The MMA database is designed for use in secondary schools, colleges and universities, and medical, nursing, dental and public health schools. It provides material relevant to a wide range of courses, including American history, history of health and healing, American studies, sociology, women's studies, and communications. The database may be used not only to stimulate discussions of advertising and health, but also to build critical thinking skills in general.

The National Humanities Center (http://www.nhc.rtp.nc.us) is the country's only independent institute for advanced study in the humanities. A private, nonprofit institution, the Center exists to encourage excellent scholarship and to affirm the importance of the humanities in American society. Leaders from higher education, the corporate world, and public life founded the Center in 1976, convinced that we must study history, language and literature, philosophy, the arts, religion, law, and all other humanities fields if we want to understand the human experience.

The John W. Hartman Center (http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/hartman) at Duke University is one of the nation's pre-eminent programs for the study of sales, advertising, and marketing. The Center's mission is to promote understanding of the immense cultural impact of these fields by expanding its vast collection of textual and multimedia resources and increasing the access to these materials by students, scholars, and businesses worldwide.

You can visit the Medicine and Madison Avenue web site at: http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/mma/