Before there was television or the Internet, in the days of pamphleteering, public health announcements were often made available through posters. Dangers of malaria, dog bite, bad dental hygiene, poor sanitation and STDs were advertised through eye catching imagery and pithy messages. Some of these posters are now on display at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington D.C. The title of the exhibit is "An Iconography of Contagion."
More about the exhibition in Newsweek here. Also check out the photo gallery.
It is art. It is medicine. It is politics and history, too. Born in the world of commercial advertising, health posters like this one emerged in the 20th century as a powerful new way to educate the public about infectious disease. Dramatic images incited fear; headlines alerted the public that coughing, mosquitoes and sex could spread tuberculosis, malaria and VD. Now 22 of these posters from the United States and abroad appear in "An Iconography of Contagion," a new exhibit at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. Curator Michael Sappol, who culled the finalists from hundreds of posters housed at the National Library of Medicine, says the exhibit reflects a time when people believed that the creation of visually compelling images was going to be "the scientific and modern way to conquer disease and build a better society."
Even the liveliest posters contain symbols of danger and death. Dark shadows appear routinely. In a 1951 British poster, "Tomorrow’s Citizen," a small boy casts an adult-size shadow against a blue backdrop. "He must not be handicapped by venereal disease passed on by parents," the text reads. Skulls appear in other designs. And the anonymous crowd—representing both urbanization and the impact of disease on mass populations—is a familiar sight. A poster produced by the National Tuberculosis Association, a pioneer in health propaganda, shows a father reading the newspaper, surrounded by his family. The backdrop: a mob of "unknown spreaders."
Public-health art exploded during World War II, when the government started pouring money into awareness campaigns, lambasting the enemy and the dreaded contagion at once. STD posters exonerated the soldiers they targeted, blaming the spread of syphilis and gonorrhea on loose women, like the lady with the red beret. The tagline of one poster, produced by the U.S. Public Health Service in the 1940s, reads: "You can’t beat the Axis if you get VD."
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