In celebration of National Public Health Week, the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library will welcome Bert Hansen, historian of medicine and public health, for an illustrated lecture, “Picturing Public Health,” drawing upon materials that he donated to the Medical Historical Library from 2015 to 2022. 

This lecture will showcase the variety of historical insights that can be discovered in hard-to-find old prints and ephemera, with a spotlight on public health efforts starting in about 1850. Some are shocking, many are humorous, and all bring us closer to the attitudes and awareness of Americans in former times. This program will cover public health topics such as HIV/AIDS, vaccination, food production, and more, and there will be ample time for audience questions. 

Public Health students, faculty, and staff, along with the greater Yale Medical campus, Yale University affiliates at large, and the public, are invited to attend this virtual lecture to gain a greater sense of the rich history of public health in America. Please email publichealth.librarians@yale.edu with any questions about this event.

Register here: https://yalelibrary.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_WGnh9qViQ0Sx4yQ9RoNKwA

**Please note: your registration confirmation for this event will include Zoom details to join the program. 

Click here to learn more about the collection.

Bert Hansen is Professor Emeritus of History at Baruch College of the City University of New York. After completing a bachelor’s degree in science at Columbia and a doctorate in history at Princeton, Hansen embarked on a forty-year career of classroom teaching of the history of science and medicine at Binghamton University, the University of Toronto, New York University, and Baruch College, with residential fellowships at Harvard and at the Institute for Advanced Study. After he retired in 2015, he had time for new research and publications and for organizing the several thousand prints and ephemera he had been collecting. In addition to his many articles about American popular culture, he recently published four articles about the fine arts in the life and work of Louis Pasteur. 

A consistent theme of his scholarly work has been to demonstrate the value of integrating popular imagery of medicine and public health into the narratives of their history. He built his collection to have available hard-to-find items as evidence for his historical writings because such informal materials have not been generally preserved by libraries and museums. He has donated research materials to many libraries, but his single largest gift was to the medical historical library at the Yale Medical School, with a few thousand items so far. For more information, visit www.BertHansen.com .