‘The Strophanthin question’: early scientific marketing of cardiac drugs in two national markets (France and Germany, 1900–1930)

Abstract

Historical analyses of marketing strategies in pharmaceutical companies have focused disproportionately on ‘big-pharma’ corporations. This paper explores scientific marketing at the ‘ordinary’ level of a minor pharmaceutical – called Strophanthin in Germany and Ouabaine in France – used for treating cardiac problems. The narrative offers a comparative German-French perspective but will emphasize the early twentieth century activities of a German, middle-sized, family-run pharmaceutical company, Boehringer Mannheim. The case highlights the existence of a pre-1940 nexus of corporate-professional relations that contrasts with the analytic narratives of the extant literature, which primarily gives attention to that small number of corporations whose operations have spanned the earlier and later decades of the twentieth century and to their approaches to industrial R&D and marketing. Here the focus is on the marketing practices of a middle-sized firm, which deployed a strategy of marketing different than their larger competitors, including their approach to national and international market sales. In this context, a ‘physician-push model’ of marketing was pre-eminent, in which individual physicians, such as Albert Fraenkel in the Strophanthin case, played a central role not only in researching and developing a drug but also in its promotion. Looking at ‘scientific marketing’ as a form of promotion that was part of a transnational peer-to-peer network, the paper concludes that significant differences existed between France and Germany in their style of advertising in professional journals.