Health for Sale: Posters from the William H. Helfand Collection (April 2 – July 31, 2011) presents some 50 health-related posters, their subjects ranging from medical conferences, good hygiene, and pharmaceuticals to spurious cures. The advertisements are drawn from the personal collection of William H. Helfand, who has been amassing fine prints, drawings, caricatures, trade cards, posters, and ephemera depicting medical subjects since the mid-1950s. The exhibition is drawn from the many generous gifts that he has made to the Philadelphia Museum of Art over the course of more than four decades.

"Bill Helfand, a longstanding member of our Prints, Drawings, and Photographs Committee, has donated more than 1,600 works to the Museum," said Timothy Rub, the George D. Widener Director and Chief Executive Officer at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. "We are deeply grateful for his generosity, for these gifts have provided a cornerstone of the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s collection of Ars Medica — prints, drawing, photographs, posters, illustrated books, and ephemera — which is the only one of its type in an art museum in this country."

"The posters on view span the widest possible range of subjects, and are a tribute to Mr. Helfand’s tireless passion for collecting," said John Ittmann, The Kathy and Ted Fernberger Curator of Prints. "Many of the graphic images used in these posters seem humorous to us today, but their potency and effectiveness in promoting medical products and health-related agendas was undeniably persuasive at the time of their production."

Arranged thematically, the posters range in date from an 1846 — 47 poster advertising quinine bitters recommended for treating dyspepsia, to a 1985 poster promoting a benefit concert to raise money for AIDS research.  Helfand’s passion took him from the Print Club on Latimer Street in Philadelphia, to New York print shops, to the rue de Seine in Paris, where he found many of the posters now in his collection.

One of the most striking posters is Man as Industrial Palace, a diagram of the human body as an industrial factory, dreamed up in the 1920s in Germany by Dr. Fritz Kahn.