The Eyes Have It

Great collection of vintage drug ads published from 1935 to 1970. Obviously, these were created long before direct-to-consumer advertising and are aimed at the medical community. It’s interesting to notice how the graphics in some of these ads seem to be intended to evoke a consumer-like emotional response in physicians who would be more likely to base decisions on the results of large, prospective, randomized, double-blind clinical trials.

[via Boing Boing]

How the heck did I miss this? I stumbled across the site yesterday and it was, of course, too late for me to make plans to see it today. It would have been nice to see the old neighborhood. USP is right across the street from my first apartment. I’ll have to keep an eye on the Marvin Samson Center for the History of Pharmacy for future exhibits. It looks like it was a great show.

“University of the Sciences in Philadelphia (USP) is exhibiting a selection of original medical illustrations by Frank Netter, M.D. (1906-1991), a world-renowned anatomy artist who is regarded by many as the most accomplished and influential medical illustrator of the 20th century.

“The exhibition at USP consists of 47 unique gouache—watercolor—paintings from a corpus of more than 4,000 of Dr. Netter’s works that display various aspects of illness, trauma, anatomy, development, malformation, pathology, medical testing and diagnosis, and patient care. Many of his impressive illustrations, commissioned by Ciba-Geigy Corporation over several Woman with Dermatosisdecades, appeared in Clinical Symposia, a well-known quarterly clinical monograph used by primary care professionals as a teaching aid and reference. “

I’ll trade you a Cryptosporidiosis and a Cyclosporiasis for two Ecoli O157:H7 Infections.

The Center for Disease Control is offering 31 disease trading cards. The cards are very nicely designed and laid out. The images are compelling. The only thing I don’t like about them is that there is no way to download all the cards at once. Each individual card is in it’s own PDF file.

“Art images for the cover of Emerging Infectious Diseases are selected for communication effectiveness, audience appeal, artistic quality, stylistic continuity, and technical reproducibility. Art is drawn from many periods (ancient to contemporary) to ‘humanize’ and enhance the scientific content by creating order and harmony, showing chaos, revealing truth, raising consciousness, immortalizing, surprising, fantasizing, illustrating ideas, stimulating the intellect, and firing the emotions. … Emerging Infectious Diseases is not about art. The journal has a cover to protect the scientific content from the elements. But as a communication tool, art seems to work. Our readers enjoy the covers. We don’t know exactly why. But as Georges Braque once said, ‘There is only one valuable thing in art: the thing you cannot explain.’”

[Via eyes of the goof]

Mad Andrew presented a poster and shares the experience in this LiveJournal entry. “There was TEXT EVERYWHERE. Period. Around the plots. In the plots. Under the plots. Not a square inch of the posters were bare. ARG!” Although it sounds like the event he was presenting at wasn’t related to the health sciences, his comments are worth a read no matter what your field of study is. For what it’s worth, I usually recommend that presenters refrain from laminating their poster unless it’s going to several conferences. It makes the poster more difficult to transport and nine out of ten posters end up in a hotel room trash can. If your heart is really set on lamination, I strongly suggest specifying a matte finish so glare from the lights in the room don’t interfere with the poster’s readability.