Exhibiting Health
160 pages, 6 x 9
16 b-w images
Paperback
Release Date:18 Sep 2020
ISBN:9781978803268
Hardcover
Release Date:18 Sep 2020
ISBN:9781978803275
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Exhibiting Health

Public Health Displays in the Progressive Era

Rutgers University Press
In the early twentieth century, public health reformers approached the task of ameliorating unsanitary conditions and preventing epidemic diseases with optimism. Using exhibits, they believed they could make systemic issues visual to masses of people. Embedded within these visual displays were messages about individual action. In some cases, this meant changing hygienic practices. In other situations, this meant taking up action to inform public policy. Reformers and officials hoped that exhibits would energize America's populace to invest in protecting the public's health. Exhibiting Health is an analysis of the logic of the production and the consumption of this technique for popular public health education between 1900 and 1930. It examines the power and limits of using visual displays to support public health initiatives.
Today, at a time when the visual seems to dominate in education and entertainment, Koslow demonstrates that the visual has a long, powerful history in the realm of public health. Koslow skillfully draws the reader into a very compelling story, indeed a page-turner, while weaving in significant analysis. Susan L. Smith, author of Toxic Exposures
Jennifer Koslow draws attention to the overlooked history of public health exhibitions, demonstrating the fascinating role of railways, models, dioramas, and performances in delivering health advice to hundreds of thousands of Americans. As Exhibiting Health shows, in the first half of the twentieth century, even without proof of their impact on the health of individuals, such activities played a key role in promoting the value of public health programs and expertise. Manon Parry, author of Broadcasting Birth Control: Mass Media and Family Planning
New Books Network - New Books in Medicine interview with Jennifer Lisa Koslow
https://newbooksnetwork.com/jennifer-lisa-koslow-exhibiting-health-public-health-displays-in-the-progressive-era-rutgers-up-2020/
New Books Network - New Books in Medicine
The strength of Koslow’s book remains on the close focus on individual exhibitions in the ways they were reviewed, physically constructed, dispersed and received. Her careful research using primary resources in state libraries, archives and institutional collections enables a much richer and detailed narrative of these specific exhibition events in fleshing out important details missing in more generalised accounts. It is a book well worth the attention of historians, social scientists and the health community. Social History of Medicine
Introduces readers to a short-lived but vibrant aspect of progressive reform: the public health exhibit [and] reveals that reformers truly believed in the power of the public health exhibit: the passion with which they constructed exhibitions, the personal and philanthropic investments they made, and their ongoing 'faith in the value of the visual' all bear witness to their general conviction that such displays improved American lives.'  Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era
The strength of Koslow’s book remains on the close focus on individual exhibitions in the ways they were reviewed, physically constructed, dispersed and received. Her careful research using primary resources in state libraries, archives and institutional collections enables a much richer and detailed narrative of these specific exhibition events in fleshing out important details missing in more generalized accounts. It is a book well worth the attention of historians, social scientists and the health community. Julie K. Brown, Social History of Medicine
JENNIFER LISA KOSLOW is an associate professor of history and director of the Historical Administration and Public History program at Florida State University in Tallahassee. She is the author of Cultivating Health: Los Angeles Women and Public Health Reform (Rutgers University Press). 
Contents
Introduction
1. Developing Exhibition as a Tool for Popular Education
2. The Art of Exhibit Making
3. Health Trains: An Experiment in Traveling Exhibits
4. Controversial Exhibits
Conclusion
Acknowledgements
Index
 
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