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A Picture of Health: The Mass Media & Public Health in the Twentieth Century - HIS00093M

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  • Department: History
  • Module co-ordinator: Dr. Alexander Medcalf
  • Credit value: 20 credits
  • Credit level: M
  • Academic year of delivery: 2024-25

Module summary

What do Superman, Bette Davis and Kylie Minogue all have in common? Each has been used to persuade people to safeguard their health and consider the conditions affecting other people. With the advent of new media technologies in the twentieth century public health officials became convinced that mass media had to be used to improve public health. Educating people and keeping them informed about the health situation was seen to play a key role in the enduring fight against disease. People got their information and formed opinions about health from a variety of unofficial sources as well, including popular magazines, films, advertising and television, as well as from official propaganda. There were multiple discourses about what it meant to be healthy, suffer disease, or how to engage with medical professionals.

This course examines the mass media images of public health in different national contexts across the twentieth century, as well as international strategies. It will explore how and why imagery was produced and disseminated, and how it shaped public opinion. In each session we will study different public health topics through the ‘lens’ of the media. Students will have the opportunity to engage with a variety of source materials including posters, ephemera and photographs and will consider issues surrounding content, creators, audiences, purpose, and intended versus received meaning.

Module will run

Occurrence Teaching period
A Semester 1 2024-25

Module aims

The aims of this module are to:

  • Develop skills of source analysis and interpretation
  • Assess a range of source material and relevant secondary works; and
  • Develop students’ powers of evidence-based historical argument, both orally and in writing.

Module learning outcomes

Students who complete this module successfully will:

  • Demonstrate a knowledge of a specialist historiographical literature;
  • Present findings in an analytical framework derived from a specialist field;
  • Solve a well-defined historiographical problem using insights drawn from secondary and, where appropriate, primary sources.
  • Set out written findings using a professional scholarly apparatus.

Module content

Students will attend a 1-hour briefing in week 1. Students will then attend a 2-hour seminar in weeks 2-4, 6-8 and 10-11. Weeks 5 & 9 are Reading and Writing (RAW) weeks during which there are no seminars, and during which students research and write a formative essay, consulting with the module tutor. Students prepare for eight seminars in all.

Seminar topics are subject to variation, but are likely to include the following:

  1. Key themes and intersections in visual culture and the history of medicine.
  2. To Your Health: Public Health Education 1900-1939
  3. Public Health and Popular Culture: 1918-1939
  4. Fighting Fit: Public Health Campaigns Go To War
  5. Post-War Public Health Education
  6. “Nurse, the screens!” Doctors and Nurses on television and film
  7. International Perspectives
  8. Apocalypse soon – health warnings and health panics in the mass media

Assessment

Task Length % of module mark
Essay/coursework
Essay		 N/A 100

Special assessment rules

None

Additional assessment information

Students submit a 2,000-word formative essay in week 9.
A 4,000-word summative essay will be due in the assessment period.

Reassessment

Task Length % of module mark
Essay/coursework
Essay		 N/A 100

Module feedback

Students will typically receive written feedback on their formative essay within 10 working days of submission.

Work will be returned to students in their seminars and may be supplemented by the tutor giving some oral feedback to the whole group. All students are encouraged, if they wish, to discuss the feedback on their formative essay during their tutor’s student hours—especially during week 11, before, that is, they finalise their plans for the Summative Essay.

For more information, see the Statement on Feedback.

For the summative assessment task, students will receive their provisional mark and written feedback within 25 working days of the submission deadline. The tutor will then be available during student hours for follow-up guidance if required. For more information, see the Statement of Assessment.

Indicative reading

For reading during the module, please refer to the module VLE site. Before the course starts, we encourage you to look at the following items of preliminary reading:

  • Berridge, Virginia and Kelly Loughlin. Medicine, The Market and The Mass Media: Producing Health in The Twentieth Century. (London: Routledge, 2005.)
  • Bonah, Christian and Anja Laukotter, ed. Body, Capital, and Screens. Visual Media and The Healthy Self in The Twentieth Century. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020.)
  • Hansen, Bert. Picturing Medical Progress from Pasteur to Polio: A History of Mass Media. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2009.)


The information on this page is indicative of the module that is currently on offer. The University is constantly exploring ways to enhance and improve its degree programmes and therefore reserves the right to make variations to the content and method of delivery of modules, and to discontinue modules, if such action is reasonably considered to be necessary by the University. Where appropriate, the University will notify and consult with affected students in advance about any changes that are required in line with the University's policy on the Approval of Modifications to Existing Taught Programmes of Study.