Imagining Illness: Public Health and Visual Culture

324 Pages·2010·5.661 MB·English

by  David Serlin (ed.)

Imagining Illness
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CHAPTER TITLE iii
I M AG I N I NG I L L N E S S
PUBLIC HEALTH AND VISUAL CULTURE
DAVID SERLIN, EDITOR
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis
London
Copyright 2010 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored
in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, elec-
tronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the
prior written permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Imagining illness : public health and visual culture / David Serlin, editor.
p. ; cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8166-4822-1 (hc : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-8166-4823-8
(pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Health promotion—Audiovisual aids—History. 2. Health education—
Audiovisual aids—History. 3. Mass media in health education—History.
4. Communication in public health—History. 5. Public health—Marketing—
History. 6. Medical illustration—History. I. Serlin, David Harley.
[DNLM: 1. Health Promotion—history. 2. Public Health—history.
3. Advertising as Topic—history. 4. Audiovisual Aids—history. 5. History,
19th Century. 6. History, 20th Century. 7. World Health. WA 590 I31 2010]
RA440.55.I43 2919
362.1068’8—dc22
2010019709
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator
and employer.
17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
iv
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Toward a Visual Culture of Public Health
From Broadside to YouTube DAVID SERLIN xi
Part I. Tracing the Visual Culture of Public Health Campaigns
1. Image and the Imaginary in Early Health Education
Wilbur Augustus Sawyer and the Hookworm Campaigns
of Australia and Asia LENORE MANDERSON 3
2. Cultural Communication in Picturing Health
W. W. Peter and Public Health Campaigns in China, 1912–1926
LIPING BU 24
3. The Color of Money
Campaigning for Health in Black and White America
GREGG MITMAN 40
4. Empathy and Objectivity
Health Education through Corporate Publicity Films
KIRSTEN OSTHERR 62
Part II. Mapping a Visual Genealogy of Public Health
5. Contagion, Public Health, and the Visual Culture
of Nineteenth-Century Skin KATHERINE OTT 85
6. Maps as Graphic Propaganda for Public Health
MARK MONMONIER 108
v
7. “Some One Sole Unique Advertisement”
Public Health Posters in the Twentieth Century
WILLIAM H. HELFAND 126
8. Nursing the Nation
The 1930s Public Health Nurse as Image and Icon
SHAWN MICHELLE SMITH 143
Part III. Building New Public Spheres for Public Health
9. Visual Imagery and Epidemics in the Twentieth Century
ROGER COOTER AND CLAUDIA STEIN 169
10. The Image of the Child in Postwar British and U.S. Psychoanalysis
LISA CARTWRIGHT 193
11. Performing Live Surgery on Television and the Internet since 1945
DAVID SERLIN 223
12. Imagining Mood Disorders as a Public Health Crisis
EMILY MARTIN 245
Contributors 264
Index 267
vi
Acknowledgments
Most of the essays collected in Imagining Illness started as presentations deliv-
ered at the William H. Natcher Conference Center on the campus of the National
Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. These presentations were developed
for two different public symposia, “Visual Culture and Public Health” (2003) and
“Global Health Histories” (2005), which I co-organized with Elizabeth Fee and
Paul Theerman of the National Library of Medicine and with Randall Packard
of the Johns Hopkins University. Liz, Paul, and Randy were reliable allies,
co-conspirators, and lunch partners during the planning and execution stages,
and through our shared contacts and pooling of resources we brought together
speakers and participants from all over the world for discussion, debate, and
dinner. Our implicit goal was always to create opportunities for forging future
alliances across institutions, disciplines, and geographies, and I believe that we
met and exceeded what we set out to accomplish.
The “Visual Culture and Public Health” and “Global Health Histories” symposia
were supported through the generosity of the History of Medicine Division of
the National Library of Medicine, the Friends of the National Library of Medicine,
the Institute of the History of Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University, the Fogarty
International Center of the National Institutes of Health, and the Global Health
Histories Initiative of the World Health Organization in Geneva. We were also lucky
enough to have colleagues without whose dedication and energy these symposia
never would have been possible: Donald A. B. Lindberg, Betsy Humphreys, Becky
Lyon, Meghan Attalla, Eric Boyle, Ba Ba Chang, Kathleen Cravedi, Todd Danielson,
Kim Dixon, Nancy Dosch, Judy Folkenberg, Greg Pike, K. Walter Hickel, Troy Hill,
Jan Lazarus, Robert Logan, Robert Mehnert, Melanie Modlin, Christie Moffatt,
Manon Parry, Young Rhee, Nadgy Roey, Vreni Schoenenberger, Sandy Taylor,
Michele Tourney, Belle Waring, and Pat Williams.
In helping to transform oral presentations into written essays, I have had the
great fortune to work with a group of ace contributors whose analytical sophistica-
tion, interpretive ambition, and understanding of the historical and disciplinary
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
consequences of their scholarship have been not only humbling but also extremely
energizing. In short, I could not have dreamed of a better set of authors for this
project, and I thank them all for the spectacular essays they produced and for
the perseverance they demonstrated throughout the extended editorial process.
William Helfand deserves special recognition as a long-time supporter, collector,
and independent scholar of the visual culture of public health. Bill’s devotion to
medical art and ephemera is an object lesson in connoisseurship, and his example
illustrates how a single individual’s passion can help nurture an emerging area of
scholarly inquiry.
Richard Morrison of the University of Minnesota Press saw the potential of this
volume from the beginning and encouraged its development. Richard’s wise coun-
sel helped to bring this book to fruition, and I hope he agrees with me that it was
worth the wait. Sander Gilman, Petra Kuppers, and Marquard Smith delivered
incisive comments on early versions of the manuscript and offered equally sharp
suggestions for improving it. Kristian Tvedten gave the manuscript his scrupulous
attention and expertly oversaw it throughout its last stages of organization and
copyediting, while Adam Brunner, Daniel Ochsner, Alicia Sellheim, and Laura
Sullivan helped bring all of the production elements together with panache.
For their assistance and cooperation in acquiring and preparing images for
the book, I want to thank the following institutions: the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention, Atlanta; Corbis Images, Seattle; the Gran Fury Collec-
tion of the New York Public Library; the Prints and Photographs Division of the
Library of Congress; the Images and Archives Division of the National Library
of Medicine; the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institu-
tion; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the San Diego Museum of Art; the
University of Iowa Libraries; and the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History
of Medicine, London. A faculty grant from the Academic Senate of UC San
Diego provided funds that enabled the reproduction of many of these images.
David Benin and Lauren Berliner, my research assistants, responded to my
arcane requests with dazzling results.
I thank Julie Nagle for permission to reproduce her astonishing painting on
the front cover of this volume. Julie’s painting deftly captures how public health’s
ancient iconographies of exposure, vulnerability, and control are perpetually
recast and reinterpreted by each new generation of visual artists. Such iconogra-
phies continue to refract epidemiological knowledge even as they also produce
new forms of epidemiological knowledge in increasingly varied spheres of public
health—both those that already exist and those that are in formation.
A final round of thanks goes to colleagues and dear friends without whom this
book would have been truly unimaginable: Lisa Cartwright, Giovanna Chesler,
Steve Epstein, Elizabeth Fee, Sina Najafi, Joe Masco, Katherine Ott, Marq Smith,
viii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix
Shawn Michelle Smith, Carol Squiers, Paul Theerman, Robin Veder, and, as always
and in all ways, Brian Selznick.
This book is dedicated to the memory and example of Gretchen Worden
(1947–2004), the former director of the Mütter Museum of the College of Physicians
of Philadelphia, who showed us that the world we live in is illuminated by the one
we rarely see.
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