When radio and television began experimenting with storytelling, it was the personal-hygiene companies that once again led the way in pioneering new forms of advertising, a brilliant marketing move that still lingers with us today in the phrase “soap opera.” This is one of the stranger hummingbird effects of contemporary culture: the germ theory of disease may have reduced infant mortality to a fraction of its nineteenth-century levels, and made surgery and childbirth far safer than it had been in Semmelweis’s day. But it also played a crucial role in inventing the modern advertising business.
