"Sacredly Confidential": Medical Advice Columns, Consumerism, and Literary Imagination in Turn-of-the-Century Women's Magazine Culture

abstract: This article uncovers an archive of medical advice columns by Dr. Emelyn Lincoln Coolidge and Dr. Emma Elizabeth Walker from the Ladies' Home Journal that offered readers advice on how to navigate the burgeoning problem of medical consumerism in the early twentieth century. Coolidge and Walker, in their capacity as female physicians and editors of a popular women's magazine, steered readers away from self-doctoring with patent medicine, trained them to carefully observe their health, and delivered health advice that ran against the demands of a market-driven beauty culture. Coolidge and Walker urged readers to prioritize the doctor's advice over temptations of the market, not by proving their advice to be more scientific but rather by experimenting with different literary forms. The author proposes that their advice columns provide an opportunity for scholars to rethink the roles anecdotes and storytelling can play in public health communication.