Picturing medical progress from Pasteur to polio : a history of mass media images and popular attitudes in America / Bert Hansen.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Hansen, Bert, 1944-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Medicine--United States--History.

Medicine.

Medical innovations--United States--History.

Medical innovations.

Medical illustration--United States--History.

Medical illustration.

Health in mass media--United States--History.

Health in mass media.

Popular culture--United States--History.

Popular culture.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (368 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

New Brunswick, N.J. : Rutgers University Press, c2009.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Today, pharmaceutical companies, HMOs, insurance carriers, and the health care system in general may often puzzle and frustrate the general publicùand even physicians and researchers. By contrast, from the 1880s through the 1950s Americans enthusiastically embraced medicine and its practitioners. Picturing Medical Progress from Pasteur to Polio offers a refreshing portrait of an era when the public excitedly anticipated medical progress and research breakthroughs. This unique study with 130 archival illustrations drawn from newspaper sketches, caricatures, comic books, Hollywood

Contents:

Medicine in the public eye, then and now

Before there were medical breakthroughs : diseases and doctors in the pictorial press, 1860-1890

How medicine became hot news, 1885

Popular enthusiasm for laboratory discoveries, 1885-1895

Creating an institutional base for medical research, 1890-1920

The mass media make medical history popular

"And now, a word from our sponsor" : making medical history commercial

Popular medical history in children's comic books of the 1940s

Life looks at medicine : magazine photography and the American public

The meaning of an era.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 271-328) and index.

ISBN:

0-8135-4859-4