In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Imagining Illness: Public Health and Visual Culture
  • Bert Hansen
David Serlin, ed. Imagining Illness: Public Health and Visual Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. xxxvii + 285 pp. Ill. $27.50 (978-0-8166-4823-8).

Like many such collections, this gathering offers little more than the sum of its parts. Even though some of the scholars are eminent and a few of the studies are excellent, I could not find any synergy among the chapters as they rarely if ever refer to each other. To help Bulletin readers find what might interest them, the chapters are examined seriatim. [End Page 672]

Focusing on Rockefeller Foundation–sponsored hookworm campaigns in Australia and Asia, Lenore Manderson’s study mines a particularly rich collection at the National Library of Medicine. Among the papers of Wilbur Augustus Sawyer, “an earnest amateur photographer” (p. 30) and a leader for public health campaigns in the 1910s and ’20s, historians will find fascinating photographs, many of which have never been published.

Liping Bu examines an American doctor working in Asian public health campaigns, William Wesley Peter, a medical missionary in China in the 1910s and the ’20s, who employed posters, films, banners, and slide shows in popular exhibitions. The ubiquity of a visual approach to public health promotion in this era is suggested by the fact that some of Peter’s first exhibit materials were not generated by him but rather purchased from an illustrated catalogue of items developed by the American Medical Association for its own use and afterward sold by them to others.

Gregg Mitman provides a sensitive analysis of racially distinct imagery in promotional films and poster photographs created by the National Tuberculosis Association and the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis between the 1930s and the 1950s. In addition to the images themselves, he has other evidence to show the ways foundation leaders weighed when and how to shift successfully from segregated to integrated photography.

Kirsten Ostherr contrasts two quite different publicity films about health care in Africa. Medicine in the Tropics (1948) was made for a subsidiary of the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company to showcase its benevolent activities for plantation workers in Liberia. Medicine of Liberation: Aspects of Primary Health Care in Mozambique (1978) was made for the World Health Organization to celebrate the social innovations of the Mozambique Liberation Front.

Katherine Ott’s chapter, “Contagion, Public Health, and the Visual Culture of Nineteenth-Century Skin,” works best as an introduction to the intellectual problems early dermatology experts faced in classifying skin ailments, the arrangements developed, and the essential scientific service played by published illustrations.

In “Maps as Geographic Propaganda for Public Health,” Mark Monmonier brings a wealth of expertise to the subject of disease maps in the United Kingdom and the United States from the mid-nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth. He makes propaganda the keyword here. In contrast to the familiar ways disease maps function in surveillance and epidemiology, “maps are inherently more effective, if not more common, as persuasive graphics than as research tools” (p. 109).

William H. Helfand’s essay on public health posters in the twentieth century taps examples from his own rich collection of medical art as well as items he has donated to public institutions like the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the National Library of Medicine. Besides explaining periodization, sponsorship, intention, and artistic techniques and styles, Helfand argues for a historical shift that is counterintuitive to readers living in an age when it seems common to show anything and everything. Noting that “dramatic posters were more the rule than the exception in the early years of the twentieth century,” he observes that “contemporary [End Page 673] designs have [often] gotten away from the more forceful images that greeted passers-by when public health campaigns first began” (p.141).

The pictures in Shawn Michelle Smith’s essay on the “image and icon” of the public health nurse support her analysis that “photographs were employed to manage new anxieties (for nurses themselves and a wider public audience), scripting responses to the public health nurse’s new roles, and claiming new prerogatives for her,” operating “not simply as documentation, but as...

pdf

Share