Resources for instructional activities featured in Discovering Quacks, Utopias, and Cemeteries: Modern Lessons from Historical Themes.
Digital Trade Card Collections
William H. Helfand Collection of Pharmaceutical Trade Cards of the New York Academy of Medicine contains around 300 pharmaceutical trade cards produced in the United States and France between 1875 and 1925.
The University of California, Los Angeles Library has a collection of over two hundred digitized patent medicine trade cards with images of both the front and the back of each card. Locate the collection on the website using the search term “Patent Medicine Cards”
The Digital Collection of the U.S. National Library of Medicine contains images, historical books and journals, government documents, and advertisements related to the history of medicine. Their collection of trade cards includes examples of various collectible trade card series. Locate the trade cards by limiting your search to “still image” and selecting the genre “advertisements”.
Victorian Tradecard Collection, Miami University Libraries. The Charles and Laura Dohm Shields Trade Card Collection contains several thousand advertising trade cards dating from the late 19th and early 20th Century. Many feature patent medicines.
The Library Company of Philadelphia digital collections features trade cards and other advertising and ephemera related to patent medicines.
Digital Commonwealth; Massachusetts Collections Online has over 300 patent medicine trade cards from the 1870s to the early 1900s.
Check your local archives, libraries, and historical societies for more trade card collections.
