Marketing a Culture of Self-Medication

Abstract

This chapter investigates how Hoshi Pharmaceuticals marketed a culture of self-medication that tried to make patent medicines supplemental, rather than oppositional, to professional medical treatments. It concerns the most blatantly consumerist of all medicines, baiyaku, which included a variety of packaged pills and bottled tonics and, for much of Japan's early history, were vital to medical care. Historians have usually translated baiyaku as “patent medicines” or “proprietary medicines” because of their similarities to Western equivalents. The chapter uses the term “patent medicines” not just for convenience but to emphasize the global comparison. Ultimately, the chapter focuses on the marketing of Hoshi Pharmaceuticals' patent medicines, and, in particular, its most famous drug, Hoshi Digestive Medicine (Hoshi ichoyaku).