Q&A with Faculty Fellow Corinna Treitel
If you’ve ever silently sung the ABCs (or counted 20 “Mississippis”) while washing your hands, you’ve been reached by health communication messaging. Indeed, everyday directives about what it means to be healthy and why we should try permeate our culture. Where did these ideas come from? Are they always a force for good? With her new book project, “Gesundheit! Seeking German Health, 1750–2000,” Corinna Treitel, the William Eliot Smith Endowed Professor in the Department of History, takes a deep look into the construction of today’s modern health culture, using the trailblazing German example, to learn more about the origin of health consciousness and how it spread. Below, she offers an early look at her project.
What’s the book about?
“Gesundheit! Seeking German Health, 1750–2000” offers a history of modern health consciousness through the German case. How did Germans come to know that they should brush their teeth twice per day, wash their hands with soap before every meal, bathe at least once per week, exercise three times per week, eat five fresh fruits and vegetables per day and so on? Health consciousness is that voice in our heads that tells us what we should be doing to care for our health, even or perhaps especially when we are not doing it. How did that voice get there? My book uses the German case to offer answers.
What are some major milestones/innovations in the conception and practice of health during this period?
Two major milestones came circa 1900. One was demographic; the other was cultural.
Let’s start with demography. In the 1870s, more than two of 10 kids died before their first birthday. By the mid 1920s, that number had dropped by half. As infant mortality dropped, life expectancy for all Germans shot up dramatically. Meanwhile, the leading causes of death changed, from infectious diseases particularly fatal to young children (e.g., diphtheria and smallpox) to degenerative ones typical of old age (e.g., cancer, heart disease and stroke). Taken together, these changes added up to a “health revolution” with far-reaching effects.
Modern health consciousness was the cultural counterpart to the health revolution, but it did not just happen. Rather, it was built. My book investigates how by tracking a series of loosely connected movements known as medical enlightenment, popular hygiene, health education, life reform and wellness that emerged around 1900. With close connections to both public and private interests, from city governments to toothpaste manufacturers, those movements created new forms of bodily knowledge that in turn produced modern health consciousness.
One famous site of knowledge-making was Dresden’s German Hygiene Museum, perhaps best known for its Transparent Person. Introduced in 1930 at the International Hygiene Exhibit, this life-sized statue would talk about its internal organs and systems in a conversational tone while the relevant parts lit up. The hope was that by learning in this spectacular fashion about their inner selves, viewers would take better care of their own body. The Transparent Person was a hit. After 1933, the Nazis made it the center of racial hygienic exhibits seen by millions both at home and abroad. After 1945, as the two Germanys sought to overcome the infamy of Nazi medical crimes, the Transparent Person became a global diplomat — sent to Vietnam in 1958, transformed into a cow and shipped to India in 1959, and even trucked across West Africa in 1961–62. I’m interested in the wider ecosystem out of which the Transparent Person emerged. That ecosystem is the place that invented our notion of health as a state of maximum potential that must be continuously sought — that is, modern health consciousness.
What sources are you looking at?
I am looking at a very wide range of sources: medical journals, exhibit catalogues, hygienic theater pieces, songs, films, radio shows, cartoons, board games, posters, advertising campaigns, promotional brochures and more.
Why is it important to understand this history?
Health communication is now ubiquitous. Anyone who walks into a public restroom today and sees a sign urging them to wash their hands has experienced it. If you listened to the CDC during the pandemic and wore a mask over your nose and mouth, you changed your behavior because of it. The German case is particularly important for a couple of reasons. One is simply that German health educators were pioneers: They trained, inspired, supported and collaborated with their counterparts all over the world. Their story is our story.
That leads to the second reason this story matters: its politics. Americans, at least those who trust the medical establishment, tend to think that health communication is a force for good, “enlightening” citizens about how to stay healthy, saving them from too-early death and liberating them to pursue their dreams over a long life. The German case offers a cautionary tale, for some of the most enthusiastic practitioners of health education were the Nazis, who used it to get racially desirable Germans to do everything from eat brown bread to make a eugenic marriage. Health education — or, as it is now called, health communication — is a very powerful tool for managing public opinion. We need to understand its history to understand its potentials, limits and pitfalls.
Headline photo by Tim Mossholder via Unsplash
