Health and Medicine on Display: International Expositions in the United States, 1876-1904

Abstract

Health and Medicine on Display: International Expositions in the United States, 1876-1904 By Julie K. Brown (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009) (326 pages, $45.00 cloth) International expositions, Julie K. Brown mentions in Health and Medicine on Display, promised visitors not only amusement, but also enlightenment. Indeed, as Brown moves the reader across setting and time, we witness the evolution of health and wellness exhibit design, a three-decade transformation from static displays to live demonstrations, staged reenactments, full-scale replicas, and dioramas (p. 196). Specifically, Brown presents four American international expositions: (a) the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia (1876), (b) the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago (1893), (c) the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo (1901), and (d) the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis (1904). In addition to her examination of the changing nature of heath displays, Brown also presents an overview of the medical, safety, and sanitary infrastructures of each event. To this end, police presence and waste and water concerns are detailed alongside each exposition's medical facilities and practitioners, along with the occurrence and treatment of illness and accidents. Overall, Brown condenses an impressive amount of data to position international expositions as an important conduit through which leading health reformers and educators wished to promote hygiene and health [as] an all-encompassing concept that the general public could understand and take responsibility (p. 10). Health and Medicine on Display unfolds over the course of six chapters. Following Chapter 1, an introduction that establishes the rationale for her research and the contents and structure of her chapters, Brown uses an impressive array of primary source material (i.e., photographs, graphs, illustrations, souvenir catalogs, maps, exposition accounts from newspapers, magazines, and professional journals) to recount the appropriate story of each exposition. Arranged chronologically, Chapters 2-4 discuss successive expositions, from Philadelphia's 1876 Centennial Exhibition to Buffalo's 1901 Pan-American Exposition, providing first an overview of particular safety and medical issues followed by a discussion of selected health and sanitary exhibits. Brown breaks with this format in Chapters 5 and 6. In these chapters, she details St. Louis's 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, with Chapter 5 dedicated to Site and Services and Chapter 6 to exhibits (p. 123). Brown ends with a summary and conclusion in her brief Afterword. One of the most interesting threads throughout Health and Medicine on Display is the dynamic and sustained presence of the nation's armed forces at each exposition. Brown notes the U.S. Army, Navy, and later, the government's Marine Hospital Service (MHS) used impressive financial resources to promote their medical and surgical advances through ever-progressing displays. The evolution of the MHS exposition presence serves as an example. Founded in 1798 for the care of the nation's merchant marines, the MHS was the nation's oldest government-affiliated medical service. Although absent from the 1876 Centennial Exhibition of Philadelphia, Brown observes that by the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, the MHS had risen in prominence because of expanded involvement in U.S. quarantine procedures and immigrant health inspection. In Chicago, the MHS highlighted its involvement in these national issues through [t]wo large topographical models . …