“Immune from a Thousand Ailments”: Advertising Immunity in Australia, 1890–1945

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ABSTRACT In the late 19th century, as the Australian public was adjusting to germ theory, a narrative of immunity provided new ways to understand resistance to disease. Advertising, particularly for patent medicines, frequently adopted a hyperbolic rhetoric of immunity to sell products. In this article, we use the Trove database to present the ways immunity was presented to the public in newspaper advertising between 1890 and 1945. Our article combines a broad overview of portrayals of immunity with three focused analyses that demonstrate immunity’s discursive range, its decoupling from immunological understandings and its insertion into capitalism. First, we show how clothing brands framed their products as modes of enhanced boundary protection superior to patent medicines. Second, we look to the connections between immunity and racial identity, revealing how advertisements followed an immunological logic: White Australians, advertisements implied, could immunise themselves against the unfamiliar by incorporating small elements of difference into their diet and health regimes. Finally, we unpack the advertisements’ oscillation between immunity as an enhancement to the body and as a remedy for an inherent bodily weakness. This movement, illuminated through Jacques Derrida’s logic of the supplement, reinforced the alignment of immunity with products and brands rather than immunological functions.