Germ City: Microbes and the Metropolis. Museum of the City of New York, New York, New York (review)

On August 17, 1918, New York City's Weekly Bulletin of the Department of Healthreported that a Norwegian steamer had arrived in the city's harbor carrying twenty-one people infected with the "Spanish Flu." Although this strain of influenza seemed to be especially deadly among civilians and soldiers fighting on the front lines in Europe, the city's health department assured the public that there was no need for alarm. New York City had decades of experience with epidemic diseases, and the health department was well-equipped to fight the flu. Although the 1918 influenza pandemic went on to kill an estimated 50 million people and infect 500 million worldwide, New Yorkers faired relatively well in comparison. Thanks to the health department's innovative measures, which included the creation of emergency health districts that offered localized care, New York City weathered the 1918 flu better than most other major US cities. ¹On the centennial of the pandemic, The Museum of the City of New York opened a new exhibit that explored the city's long history with infectious diseases. Germ City: Microbes and the Metropolisblended historical artifacts with contemporary art pieces, and in doing so, demonstrated the complicated ways New Yorkers interacted with epidemics, both past and present.

Germ City was a joint project between the Museum of the City of New York and the New York Academy of Medicine, and was created in collaboration with the London medical library and museum, Wellcome Collection. The exhibition was part of Wellcome's larger international project, Contagious Cities, which explored the interplay between microbes, migration, and the metropolis through shows in New York, Geneva, and Hong Kong.

Located on the third floor of the museum, visitors to the exhibition are greeted with a wall-sized graphic called "The Conquest of Pestilence" that offers a time-line of New York City's encounters with epidemic diseases, including mortality rates for each. What becomes immediately clear is that the 1918 flu was, in fact, a small blip on the epidemic timeline in comparison to longer, more protracted, and certainly more deadly diseases like smallpox, cholera, and even yellow fever. The graphic does an excellent job situating museum visitors within the larger history of infectious diseases in the city and provides important context before entering the main gallery.

Once visitors enter the exhibition, they are immediately immersed into the world of public health in New York City. The main gallery features a long winding table, much like the shape of a microbe itself, and contains most of the exhibition objects. The flow of the table is meant to symbolize the movement of contagion through the city, and its five nodes represent New York City's five boroughs. Germ Cityis not organized chronologically, nor is it sectioned off disease-by-disease. Rather, the exhibition contains a multitude of objects to explore based on five corresponding themes: microbes in the metropolis, containment, investigation, care, and the urban environment. The first section of the exhibition, "microbes in the metropolis," familiarizes visitors with the numerous contagious diseases that have invaded New York City throughout its history, while the remaining four highlight the responses of the government, medical professionals, and everyday New Yorkers.

A particularly powerful example of these responses can be found in the "containment" section of the gallery. Here we encounter many examples of how fear of contagion is often indistinguishable from fear of "the other," and becomes the driving engine behind containing, excluding, and medically surveilling marginalized populations in the city. Visitors can view the intimidating trachoma hook used to examine the eyes of incoming immigrants to Ellis Island alongside letters written by the infamous "Typhoid Mary." In 1907, public health officials identified Mary Mallon, an Irish domestic worker, as the first...