Health and Medicine on Display: International Expositions in the United States, 1876-1904 (review)

Many of us know of the impressive World's Fair archive at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. Thanks to Julie Brown, an independent scholar who is also a Research Associate in the Department of Medicine, Science, and Society at NMAH, those of us who want to dig through its materials related to health, medicine, and technology may now do some very thorough sifting from home.

Health and Medicine on Display is not an American Studies book. Nor is it a particularly interdisciplinary one. It is, however, an important resource for scholars working at the intersections of popular, material and visual culture; of spectacles and civic life; of militarization and citizenship; and technology and health.

Brown does an admirable job rendering an extraordinary amount of data on technology, health, and medicine across four massive Expositions into digestible form in chapters devoted to the 1876 Philadelphia Exposition, the 1893 Chicago Columbia Exposition, and the 1901 and 1904 Buffalo and St. Louis Expositions. She tackles the historian's challenge of creating order out of chaos by dividing the chapters into subsections, each of which explores a kind or originator of display (state boards of health, exhibits of government medical departments) or issue of sanitation and infrastructure. At the same time, Brown makes visible in several places the difficulty that fairgoers would have had discerning many of these patterns. The book, then, reveals the balkinization of these displays while creating ordered sets of data for other scholars to mine.

Brown's work is most interesting when describing the complex relationship between the Expositions and their hosting cities. In all cases, the Expositions' infrastructures, especially in sanitation and health services, exceeded those available in their surrounding "real" cities. The result was that citizens, both fairgoers and internal workers, experienced from within unusual infrastructures of health.

Described by one medical professional as a "vast camp," these individual Exposition sites became virtual residences for the thousands of employees who gathered to construct, coordinate, and ultimately dismantle these temporary Expositions (88). To care for those injured on duty or sickened during their stay, as well as the general fair-going public, Exposition planners created on-site medical facilities and provided employees with medical coverage—a rarity in the world outside. Working within the Exposition thus ironically meant access to both exceptional bodily care and exceptional bodily risk (witness the 15 firefighters who died at the Columbia Exposition in front of thousands).

Visitors occasionally witnessed the loss of life. More often, however, they witnessed advanced medical facilities and interactive displays that emphasized the strength of regional medical infrastructures and the national military. (Occasional outbreaks of disease were typically hidden from the media and host communities.) The 1901 Buffalo Pan-American Exposition, for example, offered an emergency hospital and twenty-seven-bed regular hospital with wards for men and women as well as a morgue and accommodations for resident medical staff. As impressive as such medical spaces were, they were dwarfed by what the military had to offer. Thanks to their substantial funding and their centralized administration, displays by the Army and Navy were bigger, more technologically infused, and more entertaining than their neighboring medical and nutritional exhibits which tended to rely on small stands and data to communicate with passersby. In 1893, for example, visitors to Chicago's White City could tour the Army's replica hospital building, complete with troop encampment in an adjacent field and demonstrations of soldier wound treatment and transport. Afterwards they could head to Lake Michigan where they could cross a pier to climb down and tour a stocked dispensary inside a full-scale model of a 10,300-ton coastline battleship.

Brown recreates these fairgoers and their ample interest in displays on health and medicine, as well as the competing manufacturers and municipalities who sought to engage them. In Chicago visitors toured prosthetic manufacturers' stands and tables of anatomical models, saw accounts of the latest in...