Main description:

From seventeenth-century broadsides about the handling of dead bodies, printed during London's plague years, to YouTube videos about preventing the transmission of STDs, public health advocacy and education has always had a powerful visual component. Imagining Illness explores the diverse visual culture of public health, broadly defined, from the nineteenth century to the present.
Contributors to this volume examine historical and contemporary visual practices-Chinese health fairs, documentary films produced by the World Health Organization, illness maps, fashions for nurses, and live surgery on the Internet-in order to delve into the political and epidemiological contexts underlying their creation and dissemination.
Contributors: Liping Bu, Alma College; Lisa Cartwright, U of California, San Diego; Roger Cooter, U College London; William H. Helfand; Lenore Manderson, Monash U, Australia; Emily Martin, New York U; Gregg Mitman, U of Wisconsin, Madison; Mark Monmonier, Syracuse U; Kirsten Ostherr, Rice U; Katherine Ott, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian; Shawn Michelle Smith, Art Institute of Chicago; Claudia Stein, Warwick U.

Contents:

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction. Toward a Visual Culture of Public Health: From Broadside to YouTube

David Serlin

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

2. Cultural Communication in Picturing Health: W.W. Peter and Public Health Campaigns in China, 1912-1926

Liping Bu

3. The Color of Money: Campaigning for Health in Black and White America

Gregg Mitman

4. Empathy and Objectivity: Health Education Through Corporate Publicity Films

Kirsten Ostherr

II. Mapping a Visual Genealogy of Public Health

5. Contagion, Public Health, and the Visual Culture of Nineteenth-Century Skin

Katherine Ott

6. Maps as Graphic Propaganda for Public Health

Mark Monmonier

7. "Some One Sole Unique Advertisement": Public Health Posters in the Twentieth Century

William H. Helfand

8. Nursing the Nation: The 1930s Public Health Nurse as Image and Icon

Shawn Michelle Smith

III. Building New Public Spheres for Public Health

9. Visual Imagery and Epidemics in the Twentieth Century

Roger Cooter and Claudia Stein

10. The Image of the Child in Postwar British and U.S. Psychoanalysis

Lisa Cartwright

11. Performing Live Surgery on Television and the Internet Since 1945

David Serlin

12. Imagining Mood Disorders as a Public Health Crisis

Emily Martin

Contributors

Index