“Here Man Learns About Himself”

Abstract

When the American Museum of Health (AMH) opened in 1939 at the World’s Fair, its popularity convinced its organizers that the AMH was merely the first in a nationwide network of health museums. The AMH’s organizers had imported an approach to health education developed in Germany, which promoted health as a positive attribute through interactive, visually impressive displays that relied on clarity and simplicity—as epitomized by the “Transparent Man”—to encourage a feeling of wonder among exhibit goers. However, other museum professionals rejected this approach, and the AMH failed to catalyze a broad health museum movement. Nevertheless, the notion that presenting the body as an object of wonder will improve the public’s health has reappeared in the more recent past, as popular anatomical shows claim that exposing the interior of the human body will convince viewers to live healthier lives.

IT WAS AN EXHIBITION OF A type few Americans had ever seen. In the background, the low thumping of a heartbeat set the mood. Dominating the vast hall was a mural that featured a 22-foot-tall nude man hovering in a stormy sky above a mountain range. Beneath this giant figure, with its illuminated heart glowing “blood red,” appeared an inscription from Saint Augustine:

Man wonders over the restless sea,the flowing water, the sight of the sky and forgets that of all wonders man himself is the most wonderful.

Posed on a faux boulder a few yards in front of the mural was a life-size plastic model of another man, his skin transparent and his arms raised skyward. One by one, his organs lit up from within as a recorded lecture described their functions. To the side of the hall, several smaller exhibits showed the anatomy of the normal body, whereas others illustrated developmental and physiological processes. On the other wall, a large, downward sloping curve depicted the “retreat of death” in the face of biomedical progress. In the corner, at the entrance to the “Maze of Superstition,” stood a third figure—”a big, red Medicine Man”—meant to symbolize that greatest enemy of biomedical progress. This large, innovative exhibit was the American Museum of Health (AMH), also known as the “Hall of Man,” and it would be viewed by more than 12 million visitors at the 1939–1940 New York World’s Fair.¹ “Here,” the AMH’s official guidebook announced, “Man learns about himself!”²

Like many of the other popular attractions at the 1939–1940 World’s Fair—such as the urban utopia of the “Democracity” diorama and the harmoniously automated highways of General Motors’ exhibit/ride “Futurama”—the AMH envisioned a grand future for its visitors.³ But the AMH was intended to be more than simply the representation of an ideal future. The AMH’s organizers insisted that the visual approach to health education embodied by the museum was an essential tool for achieving a healthy future, a future where the combination of medical progress, public health work, and personal health practices would defeat disease and make optimal health the standard. This tool, however, was an imported one. The self-consciously new approach to “visualizing health” promoted by the AMH had in fact originated in 1920s Germany at Dresden’s world-famous Deutsches Hygiene Museum (DHM). From the early 1930s on, leading American proponents of health education embraced the DHM’s approach, forming an American Public Health Association (APHA) committee to promote American versions of this museum. By the late 1930s, this committee had even purchased copies of the DHM’s exhibits and hired away some of its staff, hoping that after the World’s Fair, the showpiece they had organized would become the permanent nucleus for a nationwide health museum movement. However, after the fair ended, the museum wandered in search of a permanent home until finally collapsing in the early 1950s; both the museum and the proposed nationwide network of free-standing health museums and traveling museum buses never materialized.

What made the educational strategy embodied by the AMH appeal to American health educators and museum workers in the 1930s and early 1940s? Why, despite its initial appeal to proponents of health education and its apparent popularity among lay visitors, did the AMH fail to thrive? We examine why and how American public health workers set out to adapt the German approach to visualizing health and consider what their efforts tell us about the development of health education and museum practice in the early-20th-century United States.

The AMH’s organizers explicitly rejected earlier methods of visual education in favor of the DHM’s emphasis on simplicity, clarity, and wonder, arguing that this approach offered a simultaneously uplifting and compelling message about human health. Epitomizing this new approach was the DHM’s—and soon the AMH’s—centerpiece exhibit, the “Transparent Man,” whose see-through skin and illuminated organ systems provided educators with a new solution to an old problem: how to open the interior of the body to the laity in a manner that instilled awe and respect, not disgust or titillation. The health educators and museum professionals who endorsed this approach argued that if the public witnessed the wonders that lay beneath the skin, then they would surely treat both their bodies and medical professionals with more respect.⁴

“Body Book,” one of the American Museum of Health’s iconic interactive exhibits.

Source. Buffalo Museum of Science, Buffalo, NY.

Yet this pedagogical model remained curiously passive and partly explains why the AMH did not survive. According to the DHM and the AMH, health knowledge was acquired largely through the viewer’s contemplation of the wonder that was one’s own self, and although these museums gave their visitors novel things to do, such as levers to push and flickering lights to watch, they offered few specific suggestions about what exactly visitors were to do with that awe in their daily lives. In the end, innovative aesthetics, simple messages, and an emphasis on wonder were not enough to make the AMH work, and professional criticism of this approach together with institutional obstacles ensured the museum’s failure. The story of the AMH thus offers some useful lessons, particularly about the claim—originally made by the DHM and AMH and now perpetuated by the crowd-pleasing plastinated cadaver show BODY WORLDS—that anatomical revelation and promotion of the body as an instrument of marvel are effective modes of health education.⁵

Main hall of American Museum of Health as it appeared at the 1939 World’s Fair. Note the “Transparent Man” at the bottom left.

Source. Dittrick Medical History Center, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH.

PUBLIC HEALTH AND THE DEUTSCHES HYGIENE MUSEUM APPROACH

Health workers in the United States first encountered the new German visual education in the early 1930s, thanks to the enthusiasm of key APHA leaders. The APHA’s executive secretary, Homer Calver, was a fervent proponent not only of health education generally but also of a museum especially dedicated to educating the public about health. Calver, like almost all those engaged in health education in the interwar period, had no formal training in this field or in museum work, but his formidable enthusiasm and organizational ability got the health museum movement on the association’s agenda.⁶ However, the dire financial climate of the early 1930s meant that Calver and his APHA colleagues had to content themselves with small-scale initiatives. One of these came in the form of official support for health exhibits at the 1933 Chicago Century of Progress Exposition, where the “Transparent Man” made his American debut.⁷

A year later, public health professionals would get a much closer look at the new German approach to visual education. The “Eugenics in the New Germany” exhibit, the first of the DHM’s exhibits to appear in English, went on display at the 1934 APHA annual meeting in Pasadena, California. APHA leaders had arranged for this exhibit to come to Pasadena so that American health workers—some of whom were themselves proponents of eugenics programs in the United States—could learn more about Germany’s administration of its eugenics programs, which the health educator W. W. Peter had described in a March 1934 American Journal of Public Health article.⁸ But “Eugenics in the New Germany” also served as an object lesson in German museum and health education methods, methods that American observers had begun to praise for their expressive ability. The display panels used realistically drawn sentimental illustration together with a cornerstone of the DHM’s approach, nontextual symbols and strong, simple, modernist graphics.⁹ The clarity of message, internal cohesion, and visual simplicity (at least compared with most contemporary American efforts) of the “Eugenics in the New Germany” exhibit thus further convinced American health workers like Calver that the DHM’s approach to visualizing health was the ideal choice for the health museums they hoped to establish in the United States.

The idea of an American museum devoted to health was further boosted in 1935 when the APHA formed a committee to join forces with the New York Academy of Medicine in designing an exhibit for the 1939 New York World’s Fair. The APHA–New York Academy of Medicine committee soon gained the valuable support of a third group, the Oberlaender Trust, which shared their interest in the health museum idea. Founded by a German immigrant turned Pennsylvania businessman, the trust was dedicated to facilitating German–American interaction.¹⁰ In the early 1930s, the trust had begun to sponsor visits to Germany by American physicians and public health workers (including W. W. Peter) interested in German methods of visual education. In 1936, the trust agreed to purchase a duplicate of the “famous German Hygiene exhibit” and ordered $49 000 worth of objects and displays from Dresden. This material, they hoped, would serve as seed for a first American health museum as well as for others to follow.

Along with the DHM exhibit copies, the AMH obtained another important resource from Germany: Dr. Bruno Gebhard. A curator at the DHM, Gebhard was an enthusiastic proponent of public health education, particularly visual education, for the masses. Like the DHM’s legendary founder Karl Lingner, Gebhard fervently believed that the ideal health museum was a site “in which everyone may gain knowledge by looking [emphasis in the original].”¹¹ Gebhard had accompanied the “Eugenics in the New Germany” exhibit to Pasadena, California, a trip that crystallized his decision to emigrate to the United States. The Oberlaender Trust paid for Gebhard and his family to leave Germany in 1937, and Gebhard was soon employed as technical consultant to the AMH. Although the AMH used the services of more than 400 physicians and health workers on advisory committees, Gebhard and Calver were the men most responsible for the museum’s vision, organization, and approach.

Thus, when the AMH opened to visitors in 1939, it represented the culmination of almost a decade’s effort—and, organizers claimed, a revolutionary new style of health education in the United States. By the 1930s, exhibits were, of course, a well-established mode for popularizing health; displays devoted to medicine and public health had been mainstays of international expositions for nearly three quarters of a century and had even been the central focus of some fairs, such as London’s 1884 International Health Exposition.¹² Health exhibits were proven crowd pleasers, whether they traveled aboard specially outfitted trains (as they frequently did in the American South and Midwest) or appeared in small-town shop windows during community health weeks. These were usually designed to encourage the avoidance of specific disease hazards such as tuberculosis or to promote a specific cause such as infant and maternal health.¹³ They were typically devised by health workers with little experience in exhibit making or by enthusiastic amateurs.¹⁴ The AMH, by contrast, was created by professional exhibit makers and intended to promote healthfulness and healthy practices generally rather than disease-specific advice. The AMH also contrasted sharply with the medical museums that were attached to many medical schools and hospitals. These museums, rarely open to the public, typically displayed a range of pickled or dried pathological specimens organized to meet the needs of medical students and physicians, making such museums places where, as one medical museum curator noted, “there is so much of the horrible and unsightly.”¹⁵ Finally, the AMH set out to firmly separate itself from the titillating but tawdry popular anatomy museums. Often found at seaside resorts or on the midway at county and state fairs, the popular anatomy museums attracted the curious with lurid anatomical displays, which emphasized the grotesque and the sexual.¹⁶ The AMH’s organizers intended to display the normal—not the abnormal, pathological, and freakish—and thus to be a destination for upright citizens and their families.

This American Museum of Health exhibit featured real human joint specimens placed within a stylized representation of the body.

Source. Dittrick Medical History Center, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH.

To fulfill its mission of instilling wonder and to fully distinguish itself from these older approaches to exhibiting health, the AMH adopted the more inclusive, uplifting philosophy developed and enacted at the DHM. According to this philosophy,

the student body of the [museum] is the whole public … .The [museum] offers information as a cafeteria does food, presented as temptingly as possible, for each one to choose according to his capacity and appetite.¹⁷

This philosophy of health education combined science and showmanship in equal proportions. Homer Calver had long insisted that German exhibits benefited from a certain amount of panache, panache that seemed sorely lacking in the cramped, loaded panels and homemade displays that constituted most American health exhibits. Now he argued to the APHA that American health workers needed to accept that drama in health education was not only appropriate but also useful:

Such drama need not destroy the dignity of the subject matter or distort the scientific message. Indeed the subject matter in our field is highly dramatic in its implications for human life and happiness. Without development of this dramatic quality a health exhibit may be interesting to the student but unattractive and unremembered by the few laymen who may be coaxed to see it.¹⁸

Here, he tapped into an ongoing debate among proponents of public health education about the potential and perils of a dramatic approach to health education. Previously, health workers had relied on earnest exhortations and an avalanche of information to get their message across, but newer educators believed that drama was ultimately more compelling in changing attitudes, even if dramatic films, radio broadcasts, and the like were selective in their use of facts.¹⁹ Thus, a “cafeteria” approach, filled with the dramatic and wondrous, seemed radically modern.

Typical American health exhibit of the 1910s.

Source. Evart Routzahn. The A B C of Exhibit Planning. New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation, 1918.

This drama was also harnessed to a specific purpose. According to the new museology, in the ideal museum, attractive displays held visitors’ interest until a didactic message was thoroughly and painlessly absorbed. This ideal museum was also an interactive space, where exhibits were touched, handled, and manipulated. This directly followed the German model, in which, as an American educator explained,

The opportunity to press buttons, pull levers, test one’s physical abilities and in general to ‘play’ with the exhibits is a grateful relief to the sightseer who has walked miles of musty galleries dotted with ‘don’t touch’ signs.²⁰

But these were not mere toys. The museum workers and health educators who promoted visual education argued that social science tools allowed them to understand and reach museum goers as never before. For instance, questionnaires, surveys, and visitor observation and reaction studies were expected to help museum professionals determine the best manner of presentation, whereas scientific standards and public health priorities would govern content.²¹ As Calver explained, “The value and prestige of this museum depends upon the effectiveness of presentation, perhaps even more than on completeness of subject matter.”²² In other words, for AMH organizers, the ideal museum need not be encyclopedic—it was far better to be selectively inspiring.

The exhibits that finally constituted the AMH embodied these principles and were, organizers thought, the culmination of a revolution in the presentation of the human body in which visual design was harnessed to intellectual principles. Especially representative of this approach was the “Transparent Man.” With his arms and eyes cast heavenward and his body cavity filled with semitransparent organs that lit in turn as visitors listened to a recorded description of their function, the “Transparent Man” embodied awe and—quite literally—clarity. Another iconic exhibit was the “Body Book,” a representation of a human figure sliced vertically into thick “pages.” Closed, the “Body Book” showed the exterior of the body. Turning the pages allowed the visitor to contemplate parallel slices of the body’s interior. In the “Body Book,” the body was opened, and knowledge could be obtained by simply reading its interior.

In accordance with the latest principles in museum design, the AMH was a controlled environment and a managed learning experience. This was in stark contrast to the educational exhibits prepared by early health crusaders, which had been crowded, physically and intellectually. In reaction to the sensory overload and physical contortions such cramped, visually jarring exhibits inflicted on visitors, educators and museum workers had by the 1920s begun to emphasize a “central idea” to minimize the dreaded problem of “museum fatigue.”²³ In the DHM, for instance, judicious use of open space and carefully spaced placement of exhibits eliminated the need to bend, kneel, or crane. Simple repeated visual elements provided a unifying theme, and pictures, charts, diagrams, and text were well integrated into an overall scheme. (One of the great strengths of German museums, American experts noted, was how effectively they used color and design elements to convey stimmung—mood or atmosphere.²⁴) Moreover, much less text was used, and it was much more carefully planned. These principles continued to be developed at the AMH. As at the DHM, text, image, and object were integrated but in an even more streamlined setting. The exhibit’s focal point, the “Transparent Man,” was elevated and isolated on a dais. The room was unified by color and by the use of dramatic lighting to direct attention to select elements, yet the spaciousness of the room allowed viewers to engage with the exhibit as a whole at the same time. In summary, the core exhibits of the AMH were expected to cater to viewers’ needs and capabilities as well as the creators’ priorities—theoretically, at least.

The spare simplicity of the AMH’s appearance was intended to reaffirm its intellectual and emotional message: of all the world’s wonders, man was most wonderful. Modern science revealed the principles governing the wonder within, and modern display technology made it possible for every man, woman, and child to see and touch replicas of this wonder. AMH organizers were particularly enthusiastic about the positive nature of this message. Such displays did not titillate in the fashion of dime museums with their repulsive but fascinating displays of freakery; they did not shout an endless list of facts and injunctions against poor behavior as health campaigners had; and they did not overwhelm the visitor with endless pathological variety as did traditional medical museums. Although these displays could be—and were meant to be—visually arresting, they were not intended to evoke thoughts of disease, deformity, or death. As Gebhard had written about the DHM, in a good health museum, “There must be nothing distasteful or ugly or repellent. Clarity, beauty, and health must prevail everywhere.”²⁵ Granted, the pathological did persist alongside the normal: exhibits still featured representations of disease as well as actual body parts. Yet these representations, removed from the context of the ward and the clinic and isolated in a stark, rationalized setting, were utterly transformed from the medical museum specimens John Shaw Billings a half century earlier had called “true flowers of blood and pain.”²⁶ Stripped of skin, symptom, and situation, the modern body was remade, from the inside out, into a stripped-down, streamlined representation of disembodied health.

THE SHORT IMPERMANENT LIFE OF THE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF HEALTH

Despite the exciting new methods used by the AMH, its great popularity at the New York World’s Fair (second only to General Motors’ “Futurama”), considerable institutional support, dedicated organizers, and more than $125 000 of materials and funds, the AMH never sparked a national health museum movement. Why?

The AMH’s woes began when Gebhard left to direct the new Cleveland Health Museum in Cleveland, Ohio, dedicated in 1940. They further deepened when New York City Commissioner of Parks Robert Moses retracted an earlier promise to allow the AMH to continue to use its fair building after the fair closed. The AMH’s supporters had hoped that after the fair, the exhibit building would become a permanent, free-standing museum, but they were now forced to seek another home. In 1941, after Gebhard had departed and the World’s Fair had ended, the AMH turned to the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), hoping to convince the latter to incorporate the “Hall of Man” exhibits into the museum’s elegant building on Central Park.²⁷ The AMNH had contained public health displays since C.-E. A. Winslow had worked there in the 1910s, and during initial negotiations, some of the AMNH’s leaders suggested that such a merger would fit well into the natural history museum’s efforts to make “a most impressive statement of man’s place in nature.”²⁸

However, the AMNH would end up dealing the AHM another, more fundamental blow, when the established natural history museum rejected not only the AHM’s bid for space but also its aesthetic style and educational philosophy. In early memos, AMNH officials expressed optimism about adopting the AMH exhibits, noting that “the great ideal of the American Museum is to better mankind, through the accumulation of precise scientific knowledge of man.” Yet skepticism about the scientific value of the AMH’s exhibits also was apparent, as curators and others cautioned from the beginning that the “Hall of Man” exhibits would be acceptable only if they upheld “the same scientific pattern as prevails in the Museum now.”²⁹ This concern about maintaining “proper scientific standards” continued to grow and eventually prompted members of the AMNH’s scientific staff to visit the AMH exhibits in storage to determine their scientific accuracy. Their conclusions did not bode well: of the 35 exhibits the AMNH examined, 5 were below their standards, and “several of them were distinctly inaccurate by any truly scientific standard.”³⁰ Most indicative of the philosophical clash between the scientific standards of the AMNH and the visual methods of the AMH was that some of the rejected exhibits were those that most dramatically epitomized the AMH’s philosophy of clarity, simplicity, and wonder. The “Body Book,” for example, was in the opinion of these AMNH scientists “rather poor.” Similarly, other schematic models of bodily systems, which like the “Body Book” were highly stylized to increase the clarity of the principles they illustrated, were criticized by the AMNH for this very feature.³¹

In addition to these blows, the AMNH decided instead to pursue its own health exhibits. These plans, initiated in December 1941, set out to illustrate “the most modern teaching relative to organic man and his health” and emphasized a completely different set of concepts from those promoted by the AMH. The AMNH exhibits were to be “complicated,” demonstrate the “unity of all life,” encourage “careful analysis” in the visitor, and show the “higher intellectual and spiritual functions of mankind.” The exhibits would not mark humans off as distinct objects of wonder but would “define and illuminate the great lessons of nature set forth throughout the vast displays of the Museum as a whole.”³² This rhetorical approach and the complexity of the interlocking relationships the AMNH wanted to portray thus stood in sharp contrast to the focus on awe-inspiring simplicity embedded in the AMH’s exhibits. The natural history museum’s plans, which did not include the AMH, were then published in the New York Times in January 1943, causing AMH supporters to appeal to the ultimate authority in the New York museum world: Parks Commissioner Moses.³³ Moses urged the AMNH to work things out with the AMH, although he noted that he understood the AMNH’s unwillingness to sanction “medical propaganda” like that purportedly embodied by the AMH exhibits.³⁴

The AMNH sent a mollifying letter to Moses reiterating an interest in the AMH exhibits, but the conflict cut deeper. The AMNH defined good museum and educational practice intellectually, whereas the AMH defined it visually. For the AMH, it was not necessary for the human circulatory system to be portrayed showing the entire venous, arterial, and capillary system; it was enough to convey the idea of circulation through a visually striking and graphically bold design. For the AMNH, such an approach led to a host of “erroneous impressions” and was not, therefore, scientifically valid.³⁵ The AMH relied on a clean, stylized aesthetic to sweep away the messiness of lay thinking about the body and disease. But for the AMNH, this messiness—or as they termed it, “complexity”—was exactly the point the lay public needed to understand, and this complexity was central to their scientific message.

The AMNH’s attitude toward the educational experiment the AMH represented is best summarized in the AMNH’s opinion of the AMH’s centerpiece: the “Transparent Man.” The natural history museum’s curators had first considered exhibiting a transparent figure in 1936, when the museum was approached by an American company that had produced a “Transparent Woman.” William K. Gregory, the curator of the Department of Comparative and Human Anatomy at the museum, examined the “Transparent Woman” and

concluded that it is not well adapted for our needs, except that from a ‘publicity’ viewpoint it has a high value. We are of the opinion that as a means of teaching the rudiments of anatomy it has been greatly overrated.³⁶

The AMNH had not changed its opinion by 1941, when it characterized the “Transparent Man” as high in “popular appeal, but low in instruction value, since it merely shows the location of internal organs, without detail.”³⁷ For the AMNH, transparency uncoupled from any scientific message was merely insubstantial. Wonder was meaningless without context.

Meanwhile, the AMH’s other patrons were overwhelmed with the more pressing concerns generated by the war. The Oberlaender Trust, which had bankrolled much of the development of the AMH, was now consumed with the needs of refugees and with reestablishing the friendship of the German and American peoples, and its leaders grew impatient with the AMH’s frequent requests for assistance. After paying for a “Transparent Woman” to join the “Transparent Man,” the Oberlaender Trust washed its hands of the AMH, which was still struggling to find a permanent home in New York. After several proposed sites fell through, the AMH loaned its exhibits first to Gebhard’s Cleveland Health Museum and then to Dallas, Texas, for exhibition on the grounds of the Texas State Fair.³⁸

The AMH exhibits apparently did not fare very well in Texas. In 1951, the AMNH again considered acquiring the AMH’s collection, once more at the urging of Parks Commissioner Moses. When museum representatives visited Dallas, they found the exhibits to be “sadly shopworn.” Saddest of all was the fate of the “Transparent Man.” When finally returned to New York in 1953, the “Transparent Man” was found to be very badly damaged and

in its present condition impossible to use for exhibition. The plastic casings on the arms, for example, are distorted and held in place by scotch tape; some of the seams on the arm casings are held together by stapling; the blood vessels are in part broken and displaced; and the sexual organs have been broken off and were not present with the rest of the specimen, the opening produced by this break being simply covered by a piece of scotch tape or some similar material.³⁹

VISUAL EDUCATION, WONDER, AND THE HUMAN BODY THEN AND NOW

What can we learn from the AMH’s journey from Dresden to Dallas? First, we are reminded how eager American health educators of the 1930s and 1940s were to reach a public they understood to be unhealthy and recalcitrant. This was an enormous task, they believed, that required revolutionary methods. Those methods, an influential group of educators agreed, were to be found in Germany. German educators’ apparent success at mobilizing the masses through health education inspired these American public health experts to place their faith in the new medium of visual health education, even as the Americans grew increasingly uneasy about the larger goals of the Nazi state. This visual health education enshrined the aestheticized, normal body in “a new type of dramatic textbook that appeals to both children and adults.”⁴⁰

The AMH’s emphasis on simplicity, clarity, accessibility, interactivity, and wonder certainly stimulated the imagination of exhibit designers. What, though, was the viewer of all those positive, uplifting exhibits left with? The organizers of the AMH had identified the problem facing them as a public ill-informed about the functioning of their own bodies and how to maintain health. They had also identified a strategy for inspiring the public: wonder. Although making the body transparent reveals the wonder within, this transparency is as much a gimmick as a revelation. Even museum professionals dedicated to new museological approaches designed to better engage the public, such as Carlos E. Cummings of the Buffalo Museum of Science in Buffalo, New York, wondered about the lasting educational effect of this approach. “While in no way deprecating the value of the Hall of Man as a general educational proposition,” Cummings wrote in 1940,

We are still unable to subscribe to some of the rather extravagant attributes claimed for it … as, for example, “casting repression to the winds[,] visitors, old and young, will have the time of their lives absorbing through personal experiences facts which will be of incalculable value to them in safeguarding their future health.”

These empty claims about painlessly inculcating medical knowledge were coupled to empty actions, in Cummings’s opinion. “Maybe,” Cummings continued,

our skepticism would diminish somewhat if we knew just exactly what the facts in question were and whether blowing into a rubber tube to see how high a red light would go was included among them.⁴¹

The AMH’s twisting path also helps explain the current state of efforts to visualize health for the public. In the United States today, few grand civic spaces are dedicated to providing an uplifting message about the human body and its maintenance. The AMH’s success at the World’s Fair did establish human health as a topic appropriate for museums among its contemporaries, and even the skeptical Cummings displayed a “Body Book” in Buffalo. Even though such exhibits often succeeded as temporary installations within larger institutions, their organizers failed to convert that success into permanent residence on the museum and health education landscapes. The chief exception to this was the Cleveland Health Museum, which thrived in its first few decades but eventually succumbed to a lack of visitors and money in 2006.⁴² The organizers of the AMH had envisioned a national network of health museums, but in the decades since World War II, health topics usually have been relegated to isolated exhibits within larger museums of science. Even the spectacular success of the traveling plastinated cadaver shows often generically referred to as “BodyWorlds,” which have traveled from one science center to another, shows how health topics continue to have only a fleeting presence in most museums.

Yet nearly three quarters of a century later, the AMH organizers’ aesthetic and emotive goals are shared by many of those who claim to foster learning about health. The previously mentioned body worlds exhibitions, for instance, rely entirely on revelation of the body’s interior to attract interest, and their organizers argue that by stimulating emotional responses, this revelation encourages changed health behavior.⁴³ The (as-yet-unbuilt) National Museum of Health, originated by C. Everett Koop in 1989, claims methods and goals that bear a striking resemblance to those of AMH boosters some 75 years ago, stating (in Chairman Louis Sullivan’s words) that visitors will “find themselves at the center of their own transformative experiences.”⁴⁴ However, the National Museum of Health’s financial and political struggles to move from cyberspace to physical space are further evidence that civic approaches to health education for the public have for the most part been displaced by methods intended for individual use, such as DVDs, Web sites, toys, and books. Today’s man may still learn about himself, but now he tends to do so alone. As health worker and museum supporter Haven Emerson wrote to Gebhard in 1950, “Health still awaits its Messiah.”⁴⁵ ■