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Alan Wald, author of American Night: The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War . Arthur Sackler began his publishing career on his high school newspaper. During the Depression he printed single-handedly what Wald called a “crude strike bulletin” for the Communist Party. Sackler took art classes at night and paid for his schooling with odd jobs.
    Finishing his medical studies, Sackler became a psychiatrist at Creedmoor, a New York mental hospital. There, he wrote more than 150 papers on psychiatry and experimental medicine, and identified some of the chemical causes in schizophrenia and manic depression. He was an antismoking crusader long before it was popular, and prohibited smoking at the companies he would later own. At Long Island University, he started Laboratories for Therapeutic Research, which he later directed and supported with large donations. Meanwhile, he established the first racially integrated blood bank in New York City.
    Sackler watched medicine change radically during the postwar years. Scientific advances were allowing companies to produce life-altering drugs—antibiotics and vaccines in particular. It was an effervescent time, though less so for medical advertising, which remained plodding and gray even as the new drugs it promoted were changing the world. Sackler saw no reason this should be. He switched careers in the 1940s and hired on at William Douglas McAdams, a small, rather staid medical advertising firm.
    Before long one of his clients was Charles Pfizer and Company, then the world’s largest manufacturer of vitamin C. The company’s newly formed pharmaceutical research department had developed a synthetic antibiotic, first derived from soil bacteria, that it called Terramycin and that had proven effective on more than fifty diseases, including pneumonia. The company was moving from chemical manufacturing to pharmaceuticals. Instead of licensing it to a drug company, Pfizer wanted to sell the antibiotic itself.
    In the office that day, Sackler told the company’s sales director, Thomas Winn, that with a large enough advertising budget for Terramycin, he could turn Charles Pfizer and Company into a household name among doctors.
    Winn gave him a budget larger than any company had ever spent to advertise a drug. Sackler “plastered the media with what would be called now a teaser campaign,” said John Kallir, a copywriter at William Douglas McAdams at the time.
    The Terramycin campaign aimed at frequent contact with individual doctors—a radical new concept. Sackler put large color ads in medical journals with plays on the word “terra” (Italian for earth): “Terra Bona” and some others. When the drug was finally released in America, he placed ads in the same font and color, saying “Terramycin.”
    Meanwhile, Sackler’s ad writers in New York wrote thousands of postcards meant to appear as if they were from Egypt, Australia, Malta, and elsewhere. They mailed these cards, addressed individually to thousands of U.S. family doctors, pediatricians, and surgeons, describing how Terramycin was combating diseases in these exotic locales—“milk fever” in Malta, “Q fever” in Australia. The cards were signed “Sincerely, Pfizer.” Doctors already known to prescribe a lot of drugs got extra direct mail.
    Then Sackler sent salesmen on visits to doctors’ offices. “They were intensive drives,” Kallir said. “At the same time, we had a very heavy schedule of direct mailings, several mailings at a time to these doctors, along with journal ads.”
    Kallir remembered that Sackler paid to have a Pfizer Spectrum , an eight-page glossy house organ, inserted in the monthly Journal of the American Medical Association for a year.
    All that combined with the drug’s efficacy to make Terramycin a blockbuster—with forty-five million dollars in sales in 1952. Based on its Terramycin success, Charles Pfizer and Company expanded to thirteen countries, and eventually changed its name to