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

  • New Images of a New Medicine: Visual Evidence for the Widespread Popularity of Therapeutic Discoveries in America after 1885
  • Bert Hansen* (bio)

It was only during the closing decades of the last century that America’s daily newspapers and weekly magazines began to give high visibility to medical discoveries. But these first episodes of widespread news coverage quickly prompted significant public interest and enthusiasm for major therapeutic achievements, and they initiated a pattern of proclaiming medical breakthroughs in the media that continues to the present. While only some of these new therapies maintained their status as true medical advances in the long run, each—in its moment of celebrity—garnered headlines and achieved popular notoriety. This wide acclaim stands in contrast to the minimal, muted, and mixed receptions granted in earlier decades of the nineteenth century to advances that scholars have usually regarded as significant: the stethoscope, anesthesia, antisepsis, and the identification of microbial agents of disease. [End Page 629]

In certain cases, advances of limited value, such as rabies vaccine (1885) and organotherapy (1889), captured people’s imagination and enthusiasm; in others, such as the introduction of diphtheria antitoxin (1894) and the X ray (1896), an initial renown was sustained in both popular consciousness and the annals of medical history. The prominence of these four, along with tuberculin therapy in 1890, helped to establish in mass culture two new intertwined notions: “medicine is scientific” and “medicine makes progress.” Regarding the general public’s notion of therapeutic progress, it may be noted that while no single event or single date can mark the “transition from a largely ineffective to a largely beneficial era of clinical medicine,” participants in a recent symposium on the famous question “When did a random patient benefit from a random physician?” generally favored a traditional dating of this watershed to around 1910, or even later. 1 It seems, then, that an imagery of effective, science-based therapies entered the circulation of mass culture some years ahead of the objective transformations that historians usually emphasize.

Breakthroughs as a Source of New Images and Attitudes

Popular attitudes about medicine changed significantly because of the publicized series of discoveries that started in 1885. This study makes the pictures and portrayals of those breakthroughs its subject while acknowledging that images are only part of the story, if an essential one. Several factors justify examining this graphic imagery. First, the pictures demonstrate the widespread attention garnered rapidly by some medical novelties far beyond the confines of the profession. Second, the appearance of these discoveries in political caricatures and joke cartoons of the era shows that they had become so familiar as to be used without explanation in nonmedical contexts. Third, this largely unexamined genre of nontechnical portrayals of medical advance suggests some possible feedback loops from ordinary citizens’ concerns and enthusiasms to the social [End Page 630] status of the profession and to the willingness of elected officials and philanthropists to support expensive new institutions like the medical laboratory and the rapid growth of health departments and hospitals across the United States. Because I am focusing here primarily on pictorial coverage of breakthroughs, I will limit description of the science, the personalities, and other parts of the story to what is essential for understanding and appreciating the visual records.

The recent popularity of the word breakthrough (it seems to appear every few days in reports of medical news) highlights the public engagement with medical discoveries. These innovations (real or apparent) are seen as major advances by the public at large. The breakthroughs examined here were more than just laboratory discoveries, more than just reporting or coverage: they engendered wide familiarity and popular enthusiasm. A convergence of factors made Louis Pasteur’s rabies cure the first medical breakthrough acclaimed in the United States. It remained front-page news for months all across the country, and the constant attention to the apparent miracle cure created in the laboratory helped to established new iconography and new institutions. In the process, popular consciousness gained an entirely new idea that medical research could provide widespread benefits.

This new expectation about progress offered a challenge to the centuries-old understanding (shared by physicians and patients alike) that...

Share