Syphilis and Pharmaceutical Industry Marketing Between the Two World Wars in Croatia.

Between the two World Wars, the pharmaceutical industry strengthened its influence within the Croatian medical community. Due to the scarcity of professional biomedical journals in the Croatian language, larger pharmaceutical companies started to publish free promotional journals, magazines, and booklets which quickly became popular. They thus succeeded in creating a broad network of opinion leaders by recruiting physicians as authors, primarily writing on their experiences with application of certain drugs. As a paradigmatic social disease of the interwar period, syphilis stimulated the development of various marketing strategies used by the industry in these publications.