20th Century Health Posters and the Visual Representation of Infectious Disease

 Video about the exhibition featuring Michael Sappol and JD Talasek

This exhibition features more than 20 health posters from the 1920s to the 1990s.  Covering infectious diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis, AIDS, gonorrhea, and syphilis, the posters come from North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa.

These posters provide insight into the interplay between the public's understanding of disease and society's values.  They reflect the fears and concerns of the time and also the medical knowledge that was available.  Considered an art form, many are beautiful and entertaining, but during their heyday, they sought to educate people on matters of life and death.

Public health took a visual turn about 100 years ago.  In an era of devastating epidemic and endemic infectious disease, health professionals began to organize coordinated campaigns that sought to mobilize public and government action through eye-catching posters, pamphlets, and motion pictures.  Impressed by the images of mass media that increasingly saturated the world around them, health campaigners were inspired to present new figures of contagion, and recycle old ones, using modernist aesthetics, graphic manipulations, humor, dramatic lighting, painterly abstraction, distortions of perspective, and other visual strategies. They devised a new iconography of contagion that emphasized visual legibility and the pleasure of the view.

This exhibition was organized in collaboration with the National Library of Medicine of the National Institutes of Health.

Click here to download An Iconography of Contagion Exhibition Catalog

Click here to visit the National Library of Medicine's online version of the exhibition

This exhibition is on tour.  For booking information, please contact Alana Quinn at 202-334-2415.

Exhibition Touring Schedule:

Upcoming Venues:

October 20, 2010 through December 15, 2010
Art Gallery
Florida State College at Jacksonville
4501 Capper Road
Jacksonville, FL

February 17, 2011 through April 15, 2011
Furlong Gallery
University of Wisconsin-Stout
178 Micheels Hall
Menomonie, WI

Past Venues:

February 15, 2010 through May 28, 2010
Claude Moore Health Sciences Library
University of Virginia
1350 Jefferson Park Avenue
Charlottesville, VA
More Information

September 28, 2009 through January 29, 2010
Global Health Odyssey Museum
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
1600 Clifton Road, NE at CDC Parkway
Atlanta, GA

September 2 through December 19, 2008
National Academy of Sciences
2101 Constitution Ave., N.W., Upstairs Gallery
Washington, D.C.

June 16 through August 15, 2008
National Academies' Keck Center
500 Fifth St., N.W., First Floor Gallery
Washington, D.C.