Picturing Medical Progress from Pasteur to Polio: A History of Mass Media Images and Popular Attitudes in America

(Rutgers University Press) Hansen analyzes the relationship of mass media images to popular attitudes about medicine and its practitioners from the 1880s through the 1950s. With 130 archival illustrations drawn from newspaper sketches, caricatures, comic books, Hollywood films, and LIFE magazine photography, his book considers the impact these representations had on public attitudes and shows how media portrayal and popular support for medical research grew and reinforced each other during this era. He is professor of history at Baruch College.