Public Health and Art

In this radio interview on a National Museum of Science poster exhibit, curator Michael Sappol discusses with commentator Kojo Nnamdi the historical poster art of public health. On Washington, DC, United States (US) WAMU radio, the two discuss the evolving ideas on using visual imagery and messaging to change health behaviours in the US represented in an exhibit "An Iconography of Contagion" at the National Academy of Science (Washington, DC, US).

The online poster gallery (showing sample posters and accessible here) displays old public health posters, whose subjects include "[s]ultry women in the shadows. Skeletons peering up from under water. Rats scampering across the landscape." According to the curator, the foreboding images, dating from a pre-television, pre-internet era, were thought to be the best way to spread messages about everything from tuberculosis to gonorrhoea. Curator Sappol, a historian from the History of Medicine Division of the National Library of Medicine, discusses the particular historical conditions - the move to urbanisation, modernity, "mass life", changes in print technology, the evolving look and function of newspapers, increased use of display windows and exhibitions, and availability of cinema - that led health communicators of that day to note the public response to the visual. They decided to try to influence public behaviours through the medium of visual art to get the public to take care of their bodies, visit a doctor, accept public health treatments, and take health direction from authorities for behaviour change.

According to Sappol, it was an age of propaganda during World War I, after which people were ready for the "modern". The public health messaging and recommendations were seen as modern, both messaging through the visual arts and, in the 1930's, on radio. Progressive ideals of the day included the ideal that people, acting in concert with the government, could shape a healthier society. Pamphlets, films, live lectures, activists planning within communities, cartoons, leaflets, and health advocacy groups, such as the Cancer Society, were used for shaping the public ideologically to create a "new person", who would defer to medical science and be part of a modern audience.

The grim posters with warnings of negative consequences, drawing on an older iconography of death - skulls, skeletons to incite anxiety - yet with humour, colour, and a quality of printing to recruit the gaze of the viewer were, according to the curator, the imagery thought to be effective in conveying messages. The messages included: drinking only clean water; discouraging sexual behaviours thought to increase sexually transmitted infection (STI); and control of rats and flies, among other messages. Gendered images, often intended for use by the military, particularly those of women who were blamed for passing STIs, show, as stated here, the stigmatising of women. Propagating fear of the city and of crowds is a tactic included in tuberculosis (TB) posters, which also encourage check-ups through chest X-rays to identify and treat unknown disease carriers. Sappol attributes the successful eradication of malaria in the US (prevalent in the 1930's and 1940's) to the use of public health campaigning. He states that visual representation can become controversial when it represents and discusses sex. Overt scare tactics were used until the 1950's when tactics changed to an emphasis on immunisation and antibiotics. However, more recently, Sappol suggests that tobacco campaigning has returned to harder-edge tactics, and diseases currently lacking medical cures, like HIV/AIDS, have taken on tactics of using visual images once again.