Humanities CMAJ

E84 CMAJ, January 10, 2012, 184(1) © 2012 Canadian Medical Association or its licensors

Picturing Medical Progress from Pasteurto Polio: A History of Mass Media Imagesand Popular Attitudes in AmericaBert HansenRutgers University Press; 2009.

In a recent essay in these pages,Anne Ishii introduced readers to theJapanese “renegade doctor,” Black

Jack.1 This superhero surgeon, who fea-tures in 17 works of “medical manga”(a type of adult comic book), may wellbe a 21st century replacement for thevery real, but no less heroic, individualshighlighted in Bert Hansen’s new book.

With pictures and words, Hansen’swork of history assesses the stories aboutmedicine and science that were wovenextensively, if not always accurately, intopopular American culture in the decadesbetween the 1880s and 1950. These sto-ries and illustrations reached mass audi-ences through their reproduction — andrepetition — in widely read mainstreammagazines, newspapers, comics, filmsand on the radio.

It isn’t easy to grasp how pervasivethe popular images and storylines about

medical research and researchers werethen. For the first time, millions of peo-ple were introduced to the same peopleand events in easily accessible ways infiction and nonfiction formats and feature-length films. Moreover, these

widely shared and repeated images gen-erally had the same “plot” line: medicalresearch had regular successes and madesteady progress, and researchers andpractitioners were invariably heroic.What a far cry from today when con-

Books

The popular culture of medicine

Rutgers University Press

These three frames of a six-page story tell how Sister Elizabeth Kenny’s innovative ther-apy for polio patients was at first rejected by the medical establishment in Australia andabroad. It was eventually given trials there and in North America because of her heroicpersistence (Picturing Medical Progress, p. 196).

Rea

l Her

oes

5 (July 1942), “Australian Bush Nurse,” p. 26.

Humanities

CMAJ, January 10, 2012, 184(1) E85

flicts of interest and pharma-dominatedresearch are more likely (and appropri-ately) to get headlines.

This book is a real joy. Hansen pro-vides wonderful selections of the graphicmaterial circulating among ordinaryAmericans in the late 19th and early 20thcenturies to give contemporary readers avivid sense of what comic books, tradingcards, radio dramas and magazine illus-trations were like then. His accompany-ing analyses make clear how the tri-umphs of both medicine and people (pastand contemporary) were regularly high-lighted in ways that made them recogniz-able to potentially everyone: think of —and see in this book — Jeanne Mance(romantically portrayed as “Canada’sPioneer Nurse,” with baby in one arm,musket in the other), Joseph Goldberger(starring as “famine fighter”), and WalterReed (the featured “conqueror” of yel-low fever), for example, as heroes in thepages of comic books that were bought,

read, collected and traded by adults aswell as children!

The extensive reproductions (colourand black-and-white), along withHansen’s very readable prose, help usunderstand how the imagery of medicalprogress nurtured a climate for publicsupport of medical research: notions of“quest” and “discovery” were rein-forced and sustained, with the media

about and public attitudes toward sci-ence co-creating each other.

Although this book rightfully standson its own as history, it is neverthelesstempting to consider it in light of con-temporary mass media about scienceand medicine. Readers will likely havetheir own associations, but what comesimmediately to mind are contemporaryiconic uses of the DNA double helix as

The opening frame of a four-page storyabout Jeanne Mance shows her holding amusket to protect a child from the dangersof a frontier settlement and proclaims that“her courage inspired the founding of thecity of Montréal and its famous hospital,Hôtel Dieu.” The American comic books ofthis era also included other Canadian med-ical heroes, such as Wilfred Grenfell andNorman Bethune. And these books did notfeature women solely as nurses; therewere also stories about female doctorsincluding Elizabeth Blackwell, MarieZakrzewska, Mary Walker, MargaretChung and Florence Rena Sabin (PicturingMedical Progress, p. 192).

In this page from a story about Dr. Joseph Goldberger, who discovered the dietary defi-ciency that caused pellagra (niacin deficiency), we see how he and his colleagues, wholacked an animal model for the disease, held “filth parties” in which they ingested scabsand received blood injections from patients with pellagra to demonstrate that the ailmentwas not an infectious disease. As in many of the comic books’ medical stories of the 1940s,children were led to see the value of careful experiments, including those using human andanimal subjects (Picturing Medical Progress, color plate 16).

Rea

l Lif

e C

om

ics12 (July 1943), “Famine Fighter,” p. 21.

Tru

e C

om

ics 24 (May-June 1943), “Can

ada’s Pioneer Nurse,” p. 15.

well as all the front-page stories ofsome “major” medical finding — toooften, perhaps, framed as a discovery ofthe “gene for” whatever will be the disease-of-the-week. Clearly, a strongstrain of what Hansen calls “triumphal-ism” has persisted over the years.

Hansen ends his book in the 1950s,when the arc of progress lavishly illus-trated for many previous decades asfailure-free could no longer be sus-tained. Stories about medical disastersbecame widely known (e.g., thalido-mide) and the consistent success “plot”had to be rewritten. No less in need ofrevision were images of physicians asonly selfless heroes.

If Hansen were to write a sequelcovering the last 50 years, the splinter-ing of the media, as well as the multipleand conflicting stories and illustrationswe have about medical research andresearchers today, would likely precludea similar summary — even if only theAmerican stories were told. Neverthe-less, because I read this book shortlyafter the second wave of the H1N1 pan-demic, I’d at least like to hope that histo-rians and popular culture experts havebeen gathering the iconography that wasused in symbiotic ways to picture theexperience and shape attitudes to thepandemic: We will need the lessons thishistory has to offer.

Abby Lippman PhDProfessorDepartment of Epidemiology, Biostatisticsand Occupational HealthMcGill UniversityMontréal, Que.

Reference1. Ishii A. Medical manga comes to America. CMAJ

2009;180:542-3.

CMAJ 2012. DOI:10.1503/cmaj.110261

This story narrated the development of the first wonder drug by Sir Alexander Flemingand its earliest applications, including the media attention surrounding the first patientsto receive penicillin. The story of little Patsy Malone, who survived, was a natural sub-ject for a children’s comic book, but it also appeared in many newspapers and her pho-tograph made it into Time magazine (Picturing Medical Progress, p. 175).

Tru

e C

om

ics 41 (Decem

ber 1944), “Penicillin,” p. 22.

E86 CMAJ, January 10, 2012, 184(1)

Humanities