This book offers a critical reflection on the complex ways in which health information and ideas were promoted and sold in Britain from 1918 to 1968. It explores the entanglement of different sources competing to guide and persuade the British public, setting in place attitudes and understandings about the health, medicine, and disease the legacy of which can still be seen in the present.

Medcalf explores how health information in British society came not only from official sources and in consultation with doctors but also through advertising, press reporting, lifestyle magazines and broadcasts. Taking in a period of significant change in both the media and medical landscape, chapters examine how these sources competed with one another but also at times worked together to sell products, change behaviours, and shape popular beliefs and attitudes about health and medicine. In focusing on this era, Medcalf considers how such developments as the rise in propaganda, technological innovations in medicine and media, and the foundation of the NHS, intersected to set the stage for a culture of health education and public health discourse as we know it today. The book will encourage further research on both historical work and contemporary debates on the dissemination of health information and the relationship between selling and health.

This volume will appeal to scholars in medical humanities, health and medical history, and the history of communications and cultures of selling.

Alexander James Medcalf is Lecturer in History of Science and Medicine in the Department of History at the University of York, UK.