Dear Doctor Card Basics

Back in the mid-1950's, doctors in the United States began receiving colorful postcards from exotic locations around the world advertising a popular anesthetic drug known as Pentothal Sodium. Its manufacturer, Abbott Laboratories of Illinois, developed a scheme to mail a postcard every couple of weeks to hundreds of thousands of doctors and health facilities on its giant mailing list, first to US addresses and then others abroad.

Each card starts with the salutation, "Dear Doctor," hence the nickname of these collectibles sometimes referred to as "Dear Doctor" cards, followed by a message regarding the virtues of the drug. By the way, you probably know the drug by its more common name, truth serum, made popular in movies and TV shows during the spy era! This was "junk mail" at its finest.

There has been rather little written about these cards by either or deltiologists (postcard collectors) or philatelists (stamp collectors). But each group will find them interesting, as did their lucky recipients.

The cards all bear native scenes depicting the people, places, or culture of the country it was mailed from. They came from every corner of the globe, including such locales as Antarctica, French Polynesia, Panama, and Spanish Sahara.

Each was mailed the cheapest way by surface (boat) mail using colorful stamps of the period. Some were mailed in bulk and postmarked all on the same day. Others were spread out over several months and can be found with different stamps and postmark types on them. They were even sent on the first day of issue for some stamps.

This web site is a resource for collectors of the more than 180 varieties of cards posted by Abbott Labs. Little is documented on their origin, and few collectors have ever been attempted to definitively catalog them... until now.

For an introduction to these postcards and others like them, read my article Dear Doctor Cards- Junk Mail with a Difference below. You'll also find several other articles of interest about them.

Do you collect these cards? Then consider joining our group. We are all interested in collecting them and share information about new finds.