How Advertisers Joined The Fight Against Germs | Nat Geo Explores

You see a commercial promoting a swanky new gadget, and you just gotta have it. Your favorite celebrity endorses a product you're not exactly sure what it is, but you gotta get your hands on it too. Right now is station wagon savings time in the west. Shopping can be one of the most fun pastimes, and there was even a time when shopping was good for you. In fact, it could have saved your life.

In the 19th century, Americans had a different concept of what it meant to be clean. They often didn't have running water. They didn't have flush toilets, and with no easy running water, the kind of cleanliness you can attain is limited. So, people would wash in a basin. They might use some soap that grandma had made with some lye, but they did not have an easy time of it keeping their bodies or their homes clean. They certainly didn't have shelves full of products designed to help them stay hygienically pure. Basically, life for many people was just dirty.

But starting around the 1820s, people started realizing that living in filth wasn't so good for their health. Infectious diseases began to go up in number in the United States in the 1800s, particularly in large cities. Then, scientific evidence started showing that microscopic organisms, or germs, often found in dirty homes and cities were the cause of disease. This acceptance of the germ theory of disease was slow to come because it depended on a belief that something you couldn't see was making you sick. Oddly enough, enthusiasm for the germ theory did not come from the medical profession but from advertisers of products.

The commodification of the germ theory of disease kind of came in two ways. The first phase was in the 1880s and into the 1890s, around toilets. Because of diseases like cholera and typhoid, public health authorities realized it was spread by fecal matter from sick people going into drinking water. I know it's really disgusting, but that is what was happening. Some of the early products that were sold to protect people from those germs included water filters and plumbing innovations—some really fancy ones too.

Phase two follows research that shows the spread of germs through personal contact: coughing, spitting, sneezing. They realized that that person-to-person contact is significant in the spread of very deadly diseases. Advertisers jumped on this and used those concerns to sell furniture. When you look at interior decorating in this time period, you can see a massive shift away from the Victorian to a more clean kind of style.

So instead of buying a velvet chair, you would want to buy a wicker chair that could be more easily cleaned. You would want to have hardwood floors and not carpets that couldn't be taken out, because the rugs were very, very bad. Rugs that you could not take out and be very, very bad.

Of course, when you have all this swanky new furniture, you have to make sure it's clean and germ-free, and advertisers were more than ready to sell their cleaning products. They sold them just about any way they could, even by co-opting someone's name: "Listerine Antiseptic. The most widely used antiseptic in the world kills germs instantly." Listerine is named after Joseph Lister, who was a surgeon who really cut down on post-surgery infections. So if you were going to name a product after someone, Lister was a good choice. He had no control over this.

Those were the days when you could appropriate someone's name without asking them. So overnight, the Lister name went from hospitals to store shelves, to ward off colds: "Sparkle with that Listerine and protect yourself." There was nothing in your life that Listerine couldn't be used to make better.

Advertisers also targeted people's insecurities, often within the cultural norms of that time to sell their products. Claiming, for instance, that their mouthwash could help you with your social life: "Poor Marge, she'll never hold a man until she does something about her breath!" And people totally bought it. Advertisers also caught the eye of a group more genuinely geared toward the public interest—public health educators.

Seeing that advertising was becoming a potent way to get people to buy certain products, they said, “Let's adapt the tactics of this new advertising,” which reduced the amount of words and started to use graphics, pictures, and line drawings to draw the eye in. They also used catchy slogans and jingles: "Protection can be yours when you immunize." Any of the advertisers' methods to sell ideas and behaviors between the public health authorities and the product advertisers—they did a pretty good job getting the concept out there that the basic cause of infectious diseases were these microbes.

This media revolution and consumer revolution occurred simultaneously with this scientific and public health revolution. It developed in other countries as well, but the United States is really one of the great purveyors of this advertising designed to get people to buy products.

Advertising agencies—the beginnings of Madison Avenue—all day from the same decades that the germ theory was coming to be accepted, by selling cleaning products, furniture, and toilets. Advertisers helped make homes cleaner and moved the needle in improving public health—all while making a buck.