For centuries, people have learned about topics related to medicine, health, and wellness through media, whether in magazines and newspapers since the 1700s or in social media since the early 2000s. In this project, honors students at Fairleigh Dickinson University considered the ways media shapes our understanding of medical topics through a comparative analysis of magazines in the 1920s and social media in the 2020s. We sought to answer the question:
how does the information about wellness on social media compare with content in magazines of the past?
The Ladies’ Home Journal was a monthly women’s magazine published in the US from 1883 through 2016. It was immensely popular and was the first American magazine to reach one million subscribers in 1903. The magazine presented women readers with content about household management like cooking and cleaning, fashion and style, care for the family including home remedies for less serious illnesses as well as fictional stories including some series that spread across multiple months and advice from a variety of contributors. It was filled with advertisements for household goods, furniture and appliances, cleaning and beauty products, and over-the-counter remedies for a variety of ailments. Overall, the content can show us how women readers (and their families) of the past learned about medical, health, and wellness related topics.
Each researcher reviewed one year of issues from the Ladies’ Home Journal on HathiTrust or Internet Archive, looking for content related to medical, health, and wellness related topics. Results were indexed through a Microsoft Form and tracked on an Excel Online spreadsheet. Each entry includes information about item’s title, form/genre, health-related topic(s), any page features, author (if listed), and basic bibliographic information.
View Student Research by Year
The pages linked below include data from the years 1918, 1920, and 1924-1929. Students who indexed and researched the years 1919 and 1921-1923 opted not to have their work made public.
Larger Observations
From more than 1,000 items indexed across the 11 years analyzed, the topic of wellness was overwhelmingly featured in advertisements.
An analysis of the frequency of terms in the titles and subtitles suggests that products that treated the skin and teeth were frequently featured. Additionally, the women readers were targeted for their work as mothers with terms about children and babies appearing often.
Further analysis of the full dataset and interactive data are forthcoming.
