Exhibiting Health

Today, at a time when the visual seems to dominate in education and entertainment, Koslow demonstrates that the visual has a long, powerful history in the realm of public health. Koslow skillfully draws the reader into a very compelling story, indeed a page-turner, while weaving in significant analysis. Susan L. Smith, author of Toxic Exposures

Jennifer Koslow draws attention to the overlooked history of public health exhibitions, demonstrating the fascinating role of railways, models, dioramas, and performances in delivering health advice to hundreds of thousands of Americans. As Exhibiting Health shows, in the first half of the twentieth century, even without proof of their impact on the health of individuals, such activities played a key role in promoting the value of public health programs and expertise. Manon Parry, author of Broadcasting Birth Control: Mass Media and Family Planning

New Books Network - New Books in Medicine interview with Jennifer Lisa Koslow
https://newbooksnetwork.com/jennifer-lisa-koslow-exhibiting-health-public-health-displays-in-the-progressive-era-rutgers-up-2020/ New Books Network - New Books in Medicine

The strength of Koslow’s book remains on the close focus on individual exhibitions in the ways they were reviewed, physically constructed, dispersed and received. Her careful research using primary resources in state libraries, archives and institutional collections enables a much richer and detailed narrative of these specific exhibition events in fleshing out important details missing in more generalised accounts. It is a book well worth the attention of historians, social scientists and the health community. Social History of Medicine

Introduces readers to a short-lived but vibrant aspect of progressive reform: the public health exhibit [and] reveals that reformers truly believed in the power of the public health exhibit: the passion with which they constructed exhibitions, the personal and philanthropic investments they made, and their ongoing 'faith in the value of the visual' all bear witness to their general conviction that such displays improved American lives.'  Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

The strength of Koslow’s book remains on the close focus on individual exhibitions in the ways they were reviewed, physically constructed, dispersed and received. Her careful research using primary resources in state libraries, archives and institutional collections enables a much richer and detailed narrative of these specific exhibition events in fleshing out important details missing in more generalized accounts. It is a book well worth the attention of historians, social scientists and the health community. Julie K. Brown, Social History of Medicine

Jennifer Lisa Koslow’s Exhibiting Health presents a detailed examination of the early twentieth-century American stream of social reform that believed so strongly in the benefits of exhibitions for public-health education and social betterment that state public-health departments bought rail cars for mobile displays; public charities hired artists to sculpt foot-long mosquitos; and hundreds of thousands of Americans visited exhibits in their town about parasites, child welfare and urban planning. Throughout the book, Koslow explores the actual efficacy of exhibitions in hitting reformers’ lofty public-health targets. The British Journal for the History of Science