'Addressed to you not as a smoker… but as a doctor': doctor-targeted cigarette advertisements in JAMA.

Analysis of doctor-targeted tobacco advertisements in American medical journals from 1936 to 1953 suggest that tobacco companies targeted physicians as a potential sales force to assuage the public's fear of health risks and to recruit them as allies against negative publicity. Tobacco companies also appeared to try, through the substantial advertising revenue passed by journals to their parent medical societies, to temper any possible opposition by organized medicine.