The world of 1930s public health posters | Hacker News Reader

The world of 1930s public health posters

worldhistory.substack.com

78 pointscrescit_eundo30 comments

The posters reminded me of a pamphlet found among my father’s belongings after his death in 2016. He had served in the U.S. Navy during the occupation of Japan in 1945 and 1946. The pamphlet warns sailors to be careful about venereal diseases. I scanned it and put it on the Internet Archive:

https://archive.org/details/HullDown/page/n1/mode/2up

That is marvelous. Thank you.

Something that I found even more interesting: just below the section on syphilis, there’s a section on breaking the stigma around cancer, encouraging yourself to get screened, avoiding quack cures. It’s interesting to think how talking about cancer was so stigmatized back then.

I have a relative who falls for every YouTube supplement. I generally ask hen if the latest one cures cancer. Often, it does :(

There is a lot of money to be made in selling hope. Sadly, most of it goes to charlatans.

The human psyche is a fascinating mess.

> The human psyche is a fascinating mess.

These people are all around me too and it drives me crazy. Modern public posters should promote critical thinking.

> Though the U.S. government eventually got out of the propaganda business

Good one!

US politics has devolved to the point where the government can no longer promote basic public health measures and we all suffer for it. It’s a fucking tragedy.

The feds don't do a ton of health propoganda anymore. They mostly delegate and shuffle money to the state who do it. It still gets done, probably more so now than then.

O RLY? https://www.fns.usda.gov/tn/dig-posters

Six downloadable posters you can print yourself? They're really pulling out all the stops for this one.

All the stuff I see locally (billboards, local TV ads) is state and locally done with fed grant money (there's a little semi-transparent fine print that tells you).

this band looks rad

https://fns-prod.azureedge.us/sites/default/files/resource-f...

Responses like this are both why I chuckled at how many “don’t tell me what to do!!!” retorts I could imagine a sizable portion of the US would reply with to so many of these (like the eat fruit one), but also it was a great reminder of how square and absolutely fucked we are as a nation due to those attitudes.

Which get amplified. For political points. Actually almost entirely amplified by political points.

If you didn’t know that Disney made a cartoon about syphilis, please take 10 minutes to watch this masterpiece/trainwreck

https://youtu.be/YHxYW0Fw63Y?si=OcrCEY4l_mJ_lw83

Please remove the ?si= tracking string, if you see this before the 2hr edit window closes.

Here is the link sans tracking:

https://youtu.be/YHxYW0Fw63Y

That's more broadly about VD.

Here's a more liberal view I remember from childhood:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdA2Z4Qt2K0

At same time, doctors recommended tobacco as safe for health with fancy posters as well.

Collection: More Doctors Smoke Camels

https://tobacco.stanford.edu/cigarettes/doctors-smoking/more...

That breath taking arrogance of artdirectors born into wealth.There where places in the us, where people were so poor they ate beans from the floor, yet some coastal blue blooded boy wonder dares to lecture them on "dont be dirty" , its the same situational unaware , classist nonsense as with todays aristocracy shoving people out of the wealth envelope and then lecture people on how to bootstrap. Well its two generations of fear of revolutionary turmoil they got for that and that living at gunpoint is what brought forth the wealth redistribution for the golden Generation.

Sure! Because, of course, the poor shouldn't rise from misery and try to break the chains of ignorance - they must remain poor, ignorant and filthy always garner the sympathy of the third-worldist left, even when the third world is in their own backyard. The poor are beautiful because they are poor!

And that can be accomplished by printing a :"just don't be poor, its disgusting " poster with tax money and putting it up at all airports.

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