Announcing HADES: Health Advertisements Database from Ebling Resources

From Micaela D. Sullivan-Fowler,

It has been a bit of a soft roll out, but for those who have discovered it, it’s been the best “rabbit hole” ever! HADES, in collaboration with the University of Wisconsin’s Digital Collections (UWDC) is a database created from advertisements collected during Ebling Library’s Transformation Project (2015-2017).  The majority of print journals from Ebling were moved to consortium libraries, to off-site storage, or were removed because there was a digital copy available through a vendor’s database.

Ebling’s Micaela Sullivan-Fowler recognized that advertisements were usually not part of the digital copy and she, colleague Amanda Lambert, and a handful of students removed the advertisements from each journal, hoping that eventually the ads themselves could be digitized, indexed, and made available via the UWDC Collections. Amanda started scanning the ads during COVID and, with the help of UWDC’s Jill Kambs, Karen Rattunde, Steven Dast and the ebb and flow of students, Tori Salaba, Leslie Sabakinu, Amanda Fowler, Sally Eberlein, and Alicia Thone; Micaela’s HADES dream eventually came true.

HADES consists of advertisements from health sciences journals covering the disciplines of medicine, nursing, pharmacy, hospital management, laboratory management, and the allied health sciences from 1923 to 2007. From small quarter page ads to full page drug ads, which often include the pharmaceutical indications, these advertisements offer a window into the clinical, social, economic, political, historical, legal, and cultural aspects of health care for several decades.

Offering a lens into the evolution of various specialties, like surgery, anesthesiology, gynecology, public health, infectious diseases, pathology and obstetrics, the advertisements also represent the evolution of the technology used to produce the type and illustrations. From hand lettering to typewriter fonts to computer generated typefaces, graphic images abound. From commissioned artist paintings for pharmaceutical companies, to high end photographic images, the researchers can see the visual culture representing, for example, the portrayal of practitioners and patients within the health care setting.

The textual promotion of a drug, technology, surgical suture, or laboratory rat chow inevitably anchors itself in the era it is created in- for example, the WWII era ads for penicillin include images and reference to military language and events, making the advertising “copy” as revealing as the images themselves.

HADES is a multiyear project, and the batches of ads, designated by journal title, now number over 20,000 searchable images online. Go, discover…and please address questions about the original print advertisements or research uses to the Health Science Librarian/Curator at:eblinghistorical@hsl.wisc.edu