Advertisers use powerful images to sell everything from cars to coffee, from banks to baked beans. That this should also apply to pharmaceuticals then is unsurprising. Whatever view we as clinicians might take of drugs, for their manufacturers they are a product like any other, and doctors are the natural targets for their promotion. In 1982 the pharmaceutical industry spent £150,000,000 on drug promotion in the UK (Medawar, 1984). We have attempted to take an objective view of drug advertisements by examining the images used in all the advertisements that have appeared in the British Journal of Psychiatry over the last 30 years.