Imagining Illness: Public Health and Visual Culture

Public health is communicated not only through policy and medical practice, but also through images: posters, maps, films, photographs, and televised demonstrations. Imagining Illness: Public Health and Visual Culture, edited by David Serlin, brings these visual histories into focus, asking how health messages have been created, circulated, and understood across different periods and communities.

How public health learned to make itself visible

The collection follows visual approaches to health education and advocacy across a broad historical range. Its essays consider subjects including early hookworm campaigns in Australia and Asia, public health campaigns in China, health imagery in Black and white America, and corporate publicity films. Together, they show how visual communication can carry scientific and public-health messages while also reflecting the social and political settings in which those messages appear.

Campaigns, maps, posters, and public images

A central section traces the visual history of public health through subjects such as nineteenth-century representations of skin and contagion, maps used in public-health advocacy, twentieth-century posters, and the public image of the 1930s nurse. These case studies offer a way to consider not just what an image depicts, but how its form and circulation shape public understanding.

From epidemics to screens

The final part turns to visual culture in newer public spheres. Chapters examine imagery associated with epidemics, representations of children in postwar British and U.S. psychoanalysis, live surgery on television and the internet, and the framing of mood disorders as a public-health crisis. The range—from printed campaigns to online media—makes the collection especially useful for readers interested in how health communication changes alongside its media.

A collection for historically minded readers

With contributions from scholars working across public health, history, media, and visual culture, this volume will be of particular interest to students and researchers in the medical humanities, history of medicine, health communication, and visual studies. Its essays provide distinct case studies that can be read individually, while the three-part structure invites readers to follow a larger history of how illness and public health have been pictured.

Explore the visual history of health

For readers curious about the relationship between images, illness, and public life, Imagining Illness offers a richly varied set of historical perspectives on the ways health becomes visible—and what those images can mean.