New Images of a New Medicine: Visual Evidence for the Widespread Popularity of Therapeutic Discoveries in America after 1885

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Abstract
Popular attitudes about medicine changed significantly because of the publicized series of discoveries that started in 1885. This study makes the pictures and portrayals of those breakthroughs its subject while acknowledging that images are only part of the story, if an essential one. Several factors justify examining this graphic imagery. First, the pictures demonstrate the widespread attention garnered rapidly by some medical novelties far beyond the confines of the profession. Second, the appearance of these discoveries in political caricatures and joke cartoons of the era shows that they had become so familiar as to be used without explanation in nonmedical contexts. Third, this largely unexamined genre of nontechnical portrayals of medical advance suggests some possible feedback loops from ordinary citizens’ concerns and enthusiasms to the social [End Page 630] status of the profession and to the willingness of elected officials and philanthropists to support expensive new institutions like the medical laboratory and the rapid growth of health departments and hospitals across the United States. Because I am focusing here primarily on pictorial coverage of breakthroughs, I will limit description of the science, the personalities, and other parts of the story to what is essential for understanding and appreciating the visual records.