Note that you’re doing a new kind of assignment featuring (exclusively!) bullet points. Bullet points do NOT mean cryptic half-sentences. They should be complete, well-formed ideas, even a couple of sentences. There is no pressure or expectation to be SHORT with bullet points. Instead, they should be coherent, sophisticated, and demonstrate your mastery of the reading.
You’ll only do EITHER main points or connections depending on what group you’re in. I’ve done just three each; you’ll have five.
Vitamin advertising—along with the way physicians’ endorsements appeared on them—played a significant role in developing the popular conceptions of the need for vitamins and the fear of not getting enough.
Ads directed toward women invoked the ideals of scientific motherhood that played on hopes and fears about raising healthy children. Images of sickly children made the idea of NOT taking vitamins an unnecessary risk.
To understand how people became so fascinated with vitamins, we have to understand the popularization of scientific knowledge generally through consumer culture.
The ads give us a new look at visual culture of health, but they also relate some of the same ideas about moral diets that we’ve been reading about, particularly the idea that you are doing something “wrong” by not following the latest diet advice.
The fact that many ads targeted mothers shows how the field of domestic science (that we first explored in Biltekoff in the context of the New England Kitchen) was continuing to shape society and women’s roles in the US.
One key difference emerging via the ads and attention to vitamins is dietary health becoming defined by specific things like vitamins that you’re putting into your body rather than a general emphasis on balance or fluidity as we saw in Galen and Cheyne.