Charles Harvey is professor of business history and management and pro- vice-chancellor at Newcastle University, U.K. He researches in the fields of.
Book Reviews / 607 increasing stylistic diversity, and reducing the physical size of paintings to match the proportions of town house drawing rooms. As “engines of growth” (p. 117), the dealers quickly saw the commercial potential of lesser emblems of distinction in the form of mass produced prints, transforming “art dealers from small merchants to large entrepreneurs” (p. 119). Exhibitions of works like Frith’s Life at the Railway Station and Derby Day attracted tens of thousands of visitors, and the writings of art critics, as “agents of commerce” (p. 136), further stimulated the popular market for prints. Success in product differentiation and the recognition of opportunities to produce lesser emblems of distinction made artists like Frith, Holman Hunt, and Frederic Leighton wealthy men before the end of the golden age, whose demise Bayer and Page explain by shifting tastes and dealer recognition of the higher profit potential of old master works that were “undervalued and relatively ignored during the boom years of contemporary art” (p. 201). Bayer and Page have given us a book whose challenging thesis deserves to be taken seriously, and one that is certain to command attention. It is a highly original, deeply researched work of scholarship that largely succeeds in making its case. This judgment may not be universally shared. In pursuing their line of reasoning so resolutely, those who look hard enough will likely discover inconsistencies, omissions, and logical flaws. This reviewer, however, would wish to celebrate a fine achievement and desist from nit-picking. Charles Harvey is professor of business history and management and provice-chancellor at Newcastle University, U.K. He researches in the fields of international business, the creative industries, business elites, and entrepreneurial philanthropy. His recent publications include articles in Business History (2011), Business History Review (2011), Human Relations (2012), and Organization Studies (2010).
. . . Health in the Marketplace: Professionalism, Therapeutic Desires, and Medical Commodification in Late-Victorian London. By Takahiro Ueyama. Palo Alto, Calif.: Society for the Promotion of Science and Scholarship, 2010. 320 pp. Cloth, $55.00. ISBN: 978-0-930664-29-9. doi:10.1017/S0007680512001122
Reviewed by Stuart Anderson Consumerism in Victorian England has received extensive attention from historians, as have medicine and healthcare. The last decades of the nineteenth century saw the rise of mass production and the emergence
Book Reviews / 608 of conspicuous consumption. It was a period of rapid scientific progress, with the public becoming accustomed to a diet of discoveries that excited their interest, stimulated enthusiasm for new applications, and created demand for products and services. In Health in the Marketplace, Takahiro Ueyama illustrates how unfettered entrepreneurship flourished in the medical field, and how it interacted with the medical establishment and emerging professional groups such as electrical engineers. Medical consumption entails commodification, which Ueyama defines as “the process by which services come to be replaced by goods” (p. 53). The book is, however, about much more than commodification, because some of the developments the author describes were services rather than products. Ueyama explores the social and cultural factors that created the demand for these products and services. The nineteenth century saw a shift in focus from treating disease to improving health. As Ueyama writes of the Victorian public, “they wished to achieve vigorous, overflowing and richer health, an imaginary ideal formed in a mutually reinforcing process between illusion and reality” (p. 281). He focuses on three types of popular products or services: patent medicines, electrotherapy, and massage. The book is divided into five chapters plus an introduction and conclusion. In chapter one, Ueyama sets the scene by examining the British Medical Association’s campaign against patent medicines, or “Secret Remedies.” In chapter two, he explores in some detail medical consumerism and the commodity culture between 1884 and 1914. In chapter three, Ueyama describes the rise of electrotherapy, the colorful characters involved in its promotion, and the commercialization of devices that ensued. In chapter four, he considers the professional and institutional issues raised by electrotherapy and the reaction of the medical establishment. He explores the evolution of massage in chapter five, describing its early association with the sex trade and its later transformation into physiotherapy. Ueyama vividly illustrates the role played by advertising in the commodification of patent medicines in the late nineteenth century. By the end of the century, between 20 and 30 percent of all advertisements were for patent medicines. These were the means not only of defeating disease but also of attaining perfect health. Products were aimed at those suffering from lack of appetite, nervous prostration, and so on. Patent medicines became “cultural artifacts to be promoted through mass advertising” (p. 77). Electricity’s discovery led to new theories about the electrical nature of the body, which were often attractive to a public largely ignorant of how the human body worked and what went wrong with it. A
Book Reviews / 609 substantial numbers of electrical entrepreneurs were only too happy to capitalize on these theories. Massage came to the attention of the medical profession in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Concerns about massage were first raised by Ernest Hart, editor of the British Medical Journal, who ran a series of in-depth reports on immoral massage establishments. Parts of London, it seemed, were becoming hotbeds of vice, where “innocent girls, dreaming of being professional masseuses, were expected to be ‘agreeable’ to the gentlemen clients” (p. 227). Ueyama explains how the medical profession got involved, how massage techniques became increasingly accepted among doctors as a legitimate form of treatment, and how massage ultimately became a profitable niche for both doctors and businessmen. Ueyama’s analysis is as much about the internal tensions caused by commodification within the professions as it is about the conflicts between different professions and entrepreneurs. For some practitioners, such as doctors, the state awarded professional monopolies, but all grappled with establishing appropriate boundaries between professionalism and commercialism. Ueyama vividly illustrates, for example, the perennial tension within pharmacy, expressed by a contemporary: “The idea that the profession and the trade of pharmacy are distinct and incompatible is incorrect, for they are closely interwoven, and the most successful man from a professional point of view will probably draw the largest returns from his business” (p. 39). The book is well-written, although a number of terms would have benefited from greater clarification. The terms “patent,” “proprietary,” and “over-the-counter” medicine are used interchangeably; and the legitimate seller of medicines is variously described as a “chemist,” “chemist and druggist,” or “pharmacist,” with scant regard to the evolving nature of the pharmacy profession from its pre-apothecary origins. The “late-Victorian London” of the title should not be taken too literally; although much of the action takes place in London, there are also many references to other parts of Britain. At the same time, Ueyama tries a little too hard to demonstrate the relevance of his thesis to modern America. He suggests, for example, that his investigations “serve to document the origins of what we observe today in the United States, where medical capitalism manifests itself most ubiquitously” (p. 13). How well the experience of late Victorian London translates to twentyfirst century America is not at all clear. Nevertheless, this is a scholarly and rigorously researched book. Ueyama’s range of sources is impressive, encompassing newspapers, private documents, minutes, advertisements, and patents. The book will be of interest to a wide range of researchers, including social, cultural,
Book Reviews / 610 and medical historians, although business and economic historians may find the lack of financial data disappointing. Information about the number of appliances made, how much they were sold for, and the fortunes made by their inventors, for example, would have been illuminating. Despite its minor limitations, this book is an entertaining read, and Ueyama makes a useful contribution to a complex field within the history of medicine. He has succeeded in his stated aim of recounting how Victorian entrepreneurs created demand for new products and services, how they tested the boundaries of medical monopoly, and how these boundaries were ultimately renegotiated. Stuart Anderson is reader in the social history of pharmacy at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, where he is also Associate Dean of Studies. He is the author of many articles and papers on the history of pharmacy and medicines in Great Britain, and is the editor of Making Medicines: A Brief History of Pharmacy and Pharmaceuticals (2005).
. . . Sold! Advertising and the Bourgeois Female Consumer in Munich, 1900–1914. By Monica Neve. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2010. 257 pp. Illustrations, bibliography, notes. Cloth, $90.00. ISBN: 978-3-51509343-9. doi:10.1017/S0007680512001043
Reviewed by Anke Ortlepp In her fine study, Sold! Advertising and the Bourgeois Female Consumer in Munich, 1900–1914, Monica Neve analyzes representations of German bourgeois women consumers in contemporary advertising. Focusing on the promotional materials used by four stores in the city of Munich, she studies how the stores enticed women to shop and framed them as consumers by drawing on familiar and redefined images of femininity. Although Neve’s sample is small, it includes retail outlets whose significance reached beyond the local market: the Roeckl glove manufacturer, which maintained outlets in other German cities, including Berlin; the Loden-Frey outdoor apparel store; and the Oberpollinger and Hermann Tietz department stores, the latter of which could also be found in other cities. The book’s timeframe, on the other hand, seems rather narrow. It focuses on the years that saw the emergence of a German consumer market, but the inclusion of the last decade of the nineteenth century would have been worthwhile to clarify trends and developments. Neve carefully situates her study in the existing literature on the history of consumption, advertising history, business history, urban
