William H Helfland
Expert collector of artistic advertising of all things quackery
William H Helfand, whose vast collection of prints, posters and similar memorabilia documented the peddling of spurious pills, potions and other medical treatments across the centuries in the United States and beyond, died on 2 October in Branford, Connecticut. He was 92. His daughter Jessica Helfand said the cause was congestive heart failure.
Helfand spent more than a half-century accumulating materials that hawked things like Bile Beans (“for Health, Figure& charm ”) and doc te ur Rasurel’s Hygienic Undergarments. He gave much of his collection to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the New York Academy of Medicine and other institutions, helping them with exhibitions over the years. He became something of an expert on the history of quackery and the methods of promoting it.
“It’s probably the secondoldest profession,” he said in a 2014 talk at the Institute Library in New Haven, Connecticut. “It was one of the easiest things to get into, because all you had to do was say ‘My product cures some serious disease,’ and you did not have to back it up.”
Becoming a connoisseur of such oddities also made Helfand a connoisseur of certain types of art, especially as lithography and other printing methods advanced in the 19th and 20th centuries and artists like Franz von Stuck and Louis Raemaekers created posters on medical themes.
“Bill Helfand could be described in many different ways, all of them admirable,” Timothy Rub, director and chief executive officer of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, said. “For us he represented the ideal combination of passionate collector, inquisitive scholar and generous donor.”
The exhibitions created from his collection were both full of quirky surprises and compelling for their overarching resonance.
“As our technical understanding of health becomes ever more pixelated in dull shades of grey,” Abigail Zuger wrote in reviewing one such exhibition in 2011 in the New York Times, “muted by risk and benefit and by statistical slicing and dicing, the giant assertions splashed over these gallery walls are more appealing than ever. Just tell me what to do, they say. Give me something that will work. No doctor today can do either one, not without a lot of disclaimers, but that doesn’t mean anyone has stopped asking.”
William Hirsh Helfand was born on 21 May 1926 in Philadelphia. His father, Leopold, was a pharmacist, and his mother, Minnie, was an occasional pianist who sometimes accompanied opera singer Marian Anderson.
After two years in the Army, Helfand graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1948 with a degree in chemical engineering, then earned a degree in pharmacy at the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and Science in 1952. He worked for a time in his father’s Philadelphia chemists, Helfand & Katz. While working toward that degree, he took a side class in art at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, just to fill in a gap in his knowledge.
“The Barnes experience made me want to become an art collector myself,” he told the website Design Observer in 2011, “but of course, I couldn’t afford any significant paintings, so I began to collect prints.” In 1955 or 1956, he said, an etching he noticed in a British catalogue gave focus to his collecting aspirations.
“It was a 1772 caricature of a military pharmacist, and it was called ‘The Chymical Macaroni’,” he said. “I bought it for five pounds, and I liked it very much, so I began to ask myself if there might be any more prints dealing with medical, pharmaceutical and related subjects. I’ve been looking ever since.”
By that time he was working in the marketing division of the pharmaceutical company Merck; he eventually worked his way up to senior vice president of the international division. Merck sent him on numerous trips, which gave him a chance to indulge his growing passion for collecting. “Whenever I would go somewhere, I would try to find at least one day for myself,” he said. “It wasn’t always possible, but if it was, I would go to see the dealers, or go to places where there might be prints available.”
Daughter Jessica, an artist, designer and writer who teaches at Yale, said her father’s collecting had made for a visually interesting household wherever his job took the family: “I grew up with my sister in a house full of prints and posters and ephemera about pharmacy and medicine. From Philadelphia to Princeton to Paris, that collection grew and grew, following us everywhere. Long before ebay, before ‘collectible’ was a descriptor of any kind, he saw the value in these things as keen ambassadors of a kind of social history.”
Helfand often said that for much of the period covered by his collection, legitimate doctors were about as likely to do someone harm as quacks were with their bogus cures; only in the latter 1800s did real medical science begin to evolve. And, he noted, some of what seems like duplicity today may have been more a matter of ignorance. “We cannot always be sure of the motivation of the seller,” he said in 2011. “It may be quackery to us, but he or she may have thought it could cure everything.”
Whatever the motive, getting noticed was the key, and the sometimes garish posters were in that sense part of the birth of modern advertising.
“They’ve got to have a catchy way to grab your attention,” Helfand told a reporter in 2011, pointing to a large poster in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. “That one over there is advertising Vin Mariani, a popular French tonic wine. Why would you look at it? Well, it has a pretty girl on it, it’s colourful and it’s a French product written in English.” Would that be enough to make someone buy it? “You’d be very happy you did,” he said, “because it contained cocaine.”
Helfand married Audrey Real in 1954. She died in 2002. In addition to his daughter Jessica, he is survived by another daughter, Rachel; a sister; and four grandchildren.
NEIL GENZLINGER
“We cannot always be sure of the motivation of the seller. It may be quackery to us, but heor she may have thought it could cure everything”