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  Televising an operation, mid-1950s.

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  Demonstrating an exhibit, 1930s

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  Detail from the cover of Medical Times, May 1960 (Steven Dohanos's At the Convention)

Medical Exhibition in the
Twentieth Century

Until the early 1980s, most large medical conferences featured scientific exhibits: collections of physician-designed displays that showcased medical advances. Except in a few disciplines, this tradition has faded away, but for most of the twentieth century, it was an important part of medical culture. In my work, I examine this practice in order to illuminate some aspects of twentieth-century medicine that have been, I believe, underrecognized.

• Display. Medicine contains an implicit imperative to make the interior visible. What are the ethical implications of this imperative? How has it affected how medicine is practiced?

• Narrative. Exhibits, and the films that often accompanied them, show a distinct tendency to narrativize — that is, to connect data and phenomena into logical, story-like sequences of cause and effect.

• Showmanship. An exhibit hall evokes other scenes of display, like carnivals and fairs. Though seemingly at odds with medicine's avowed dispassion, in fact medicine has always had an affinity for the eye-catching, and for the commercial sphere.

• Palpability. Even as medicine oriented itself toward the virtual, a competing strain of thought emphasized the palpable: evidence that could be touched and handled.