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• 1 2018-04-23T13:40:23-04:00 Consumer Medicines 11 plain 2018-09-01T11:06:44-04:00 Tim Yang Hoshi was most well-known for its medicines intended for the consumer market called baiyaku, which literally means "sold medicines" and is often translated as patent medicines. Similar to their Euro-American counterparts of the time, baiyaku often gained disrepute for their ornate packaging and attention-grabbing advertising that exaggerated their medicinal properties. In Japan, as elsewhere, baiyaku often represented the opposite of the professionalization of modern medicine. Yet, as scholars such as Susan Burns have shown, medicine manufacturers responded by portraying baiyaku as scientific and supplemental to professional medical care and by re-branding them with the neologism, katei-iyaku or "medicines for the home."
  
  An example is the advertisement below, which likens Hoshi Pharmaceuticals' most popular medicine, its Hoshi Digestive Medicine (Hoshi ichōyaku) to a "stomach disease hospital (ichō byōin) for household use (katei yō)." It described how "each and every day, tens of thousands of stomach disease sufferers are completely healed and discharged from the hospital (taiin) after taking the medicine." The advertisement depicted a canister of the Digestive Medicine overlaid with an urban streetscape, with a line of people literally walking outside of the canister. This streetscape represents the re-branding of patent medicines as modern and cosmopolitan -- as items that help people escape the confines of illness and return to participating in modern forms of both work and leisure.