Research Resource: “Announcing HADES: Health Advertisements Database From Ebling Sources”

From the University of Wisconsin–Madison Libraries:

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.

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HADES is a multiyear project, and the batches of ads, designated by journal title, now number over 20,000 searchable images online.

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The advertisements were collected during Ebling Library’s Transformation Project, when the majority of print journals from Ebling were moved to consortium libraries, or off-site storage, or removed because there was a digital copy available through a vendor’s database. Librarian, Micaela Sullivan-Fowler established that the 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 and ordered them by journal title and date, hoping that eventually the ads themselves could be digitized, indexed, and made available via the UWDC Collections. HADES is a dream come true.

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