Keep Calm and Carry On and other Second World War Posters
British Home Front Propaganda Posters of the Second World War
Check out this audio slideshow of posters collated by Dr Laragh Gollogly from the World Health Organisation… I really MUST get around to submitting the article that I wrote on Venereal Disease posters… I wrote it in 2004, so it needs a bit of updating…
Tweet Boon, T., ‘Film and contestation of public health in interwar Britain’
PhD Thesis completed, 1999. Wellcome Institute
Abstract: This is the first study to analyse and list the approximately 350 health films distributed in Britain in the interwar period. It provides a social-historical explanation for their existence, and grounds its account in the history of public health and the highly associative culture of the period. The first part establishes the context within which they were produced: Chapter one introduces the notion of the contestation of public health, first demonstrating the widespread agreement about the importance of public education in health. The main players are then introduced: the local authorities, the voluntary associations, and the Ministry of Health. Chapter two proposes that the health education policy established by the new Ministry of Health in 1920 was created and sustained in the context of a mixed public and private model of health care. Within this, first voluntary associations, and later organised Medical Officers of Health, contested the sanction of responsibility for health education in general (as opposed to that on single disease categories). Part two devotes a chapter each to the film making activities of voluntary associations, local authorities and documentarists. The style of films produced is, in each case, explored in the context of the cultures of the different organisations involved. Voluntary associations tended to prefer ‘moral tales’, fiction films with a health message, whilst local authorities mostly subscribed to a type of naive realism. Documentarists introduced a new type of realist cinematic literacy deriving from the Russian montage tradition. The final chapter returns to the policy issues introduced in part one, and explores changes in policy at the Ministry of Health which led to an increased concern with film making. The study concludes with a detailed discussion of the Ministry’s 1939 documentary film, Health for the Nation, the culmination of many long term trends.
Published Works:
Health Matters: Modern Medicine and the Search for Better Health, (London: Science Museum, 1994) (co-editor with Lawrence, G.)
Tweet‘Coughs and sneezes spread diseases. Trap them in your handkerchief!’ This slogan from a 1942 British government poster was aimed at reducing absenteeism from serious war work, but it caught on, and encouraged more hygienic habits in the population as a whole. No surprise then, to find it revived to combat the latest threats from various kinds of flu and the norovirus with added instructions about binning tissues, then washing hands thoroughly.
For travellers confined in aircraft cabins, buses, rail carriages and cruise ships, this is particularly good advice. Air-conditioning has many advantages, but one of its problems is that air-borne germs can circulate very quickly. No one wants to be responsible for spreading coughs and sneezes, or any kind of flu, over several continents in the process of one long-haul flight or ‘cruise of a lifetime’.
“This online exhibit is designed to introduce you to the history of images used in public health posters in the twentieth century. It utilizes the world’s largest collection of poster art dealing with questions of health in the United States, housed at the National Library of Medicine. Many of these images can also be viewed through the Images from the History of Medicine (IHM) homepage. The exhibit is divided into two sections that focus on infectious diseases and environmental health concerns, revealing how posters provide an effective medium for communicating information about disease, identifying risk factors, and promoting behavioral change. Two sections on HIV/AIDS education and anti-smoking campaigns provide expanded examinations of public health campaigns that have used a variety of political, psychological, moral, cultural, and economic strategies to achieve their desired aims. By examining the history and function of public health posters, the exhibit suggests that social, biological, and cultural factors have collectively influenced the design of public health campaigns throughout the preceding century.”
See the abstract submitted beforehand.
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