Picturing Medical Progress from Pasteur to Polio

Price: $37.95  

Subtitle: A History of Mass Media Images and Popular Attitudes in America
Author: Bert Hansen
Subject: Medicine, American Studies
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8135-4576-9
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-4526-4
Pages: 350 pages, 108 black and white and 22 color illustrations
Publication Date: July 2009

Bert Hansen’s Picturing Medical Progress from Pasteur to Polio was selected for the 2010 Ray and Pat Browne Award for the Best Single authored work published in 2009 by the Popular Culture/American Culture Association. The award was presented at the PCA/ACA Conference in St. Louis on Friday, April 2 at 10 am.

Praise for Picturing Medical Progress From Pasteur to Polio

“Hansen presents material previously unexplored by medical historians, while maintaining a clear narrative style.”
—Chemical Heritage Magazine, 2011

"This is the best synthetic treatment we have of the role the mass media played in shaping and promoting the high esteem enjoyed by the American medical profession across the first half of the twentieth century. Hansen has given us both a richly detailed account of the images widely circulated to the public and a convincing analysis of the aggregate image those pictures of medicine fostered."
—Bulletin of the History of Medicine

"This book is analytical, nostalgic, sensitive, and just plain fun. Bert Hansen's meticulous privileging of the visual is a pathbreaking achievement for methods in the social and cultural history of medicine. You can be rewarded simply by looking at the wonderful pictures, but you will "see" so much more in his lively prose."
—Jacalyn Duffin, Hannah Professor, Queen's University, and former president of the American Association for the History of Medicine

"Even as a long-time collector of medical prints, I learned a lot from this extraordinary book. Hansen's digging has turned up many discoveries, providing a new perspective on graphic art in popular culture. The images are wonderful, but this is not just a picture book; it's a great read as well, filled with remarkable insights."
—William Helfand, author of five books on medical imagery and a trustee of the Philadelphia Museum of Art

"Picturing Medical Progress from Pasteur to Polio is an authoritative, well-written account that will be a significant contribution not only to the history of American medicine, but to the history of American popular culture."
—Elizabeth Toon, Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University  of Manchester 

"That doctors and their work routinely populate all forms of popular American culture is a historical aberration. Bert Hansen begins his illustrated account of the start of this phenomenon with the observation that until late in the 19th century, no one really wanted any more contact with doctors than was necessary—certainly not in publications intended to entertain. Louis Pasteur changed all that. As scientific triumphs accumulated, the hagiography of the doctor spread throughout the media, from print advertisements to radio spots, from comic books to adoring photo essays in Life magazine."
—Abigail Zuger, New York Times

"Hansen’s narrative reveals a remarkably rich engagement between laboratory work and the curiosity of ordinary citizens.Hansen’s work is well grounded in primary research and includes the footnotes expected by medical historians, but at the same time it is completely accessible to any reader interested in the history of medicine. Hansen has done an admirable job of excavating the role played by images of medical progress in the popular media. Picturing Medical Progress From Pasteur to Polio is both a remarkable work of medical history and an entertaining account of medicine’s golden age viewed through the eyes of the public."
—Margaret Humphreys, Journal of the American Medical Association, Dec 9, 2009

"At the start, the practice of medicine is accorded little positive public recognition. The medical profession as pictured in magazines and newspapers is ineffective and unprofessional, in collusion with the funeral industry, and tolerant of inferior public health. By the 1950s, with the advent of the Salk polio vaccine, medicine has become a highly esteemed profession grounded in scientific research. Hansen documents the transition, making a detailed examination of images in both print and film media. Recommended."
—Choice, Jan 2010