Grave Warnings of Disease, With the Adman's Flair

An exhibition now on view at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington examines how public health experts have employed advertising techniques in the battle against disease.

"An Iconography of Contagion" includes works from many countries targeting a range of diseases, including syphilis, malaria, HIV/AIDS, and tuberculosis. "There have been some very sexy, colorful, playful posters about some very serious diseases," said Dr. Michael Sappol, the exhibit's curator and a historian at the National Library of Medicine, part of the National Institutes of Health.

Historians have documented the rapid visual changes that took place in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Newspapers expanded their headlines and their use of illustrations, while the advertising industry integrated text and images, and began incorporating principles from the behavioral sciences.

Concurrently, public health groups like the National Tuberculosis Association, founded in 1904, looked to advertising for ways to motivate people to take important steps to protect their health. "Media campaigns were themselves seen as magic bullets," Sappol said. One poster, created in China in 1935, warns against the danger of spreading TB through spitting, showing magnified bacteria living within a clump of spittle. Taking care not to spit on the ground, it says, "not only ensures virtue but is a gift to mankind."

Sappol noted that reliance on posters to spread messages about public health declined in the 1960s in the United States as people welcomed important advances in vaccines and treatment. But that optimism was shattered in the 1980s and 1990s by the emergence of HIV/AIDS, leading to a revival of graphical efforts to modify behavior.

Dr. Mary E. Wilson of the Harvard School of Public Health noted that while World War II era STD posters generally viewed the woman "as the villain and men almost as innocent bystanders," major public health campaigns against HIV/AIDS "tried very hard to work against that stigma."

The exhibit remains on view through Dec. 19. For more information, visit http://www7.nationalacademies.org/arts/Iconography_Contagion.html

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