NLM historian Michael Sappol was a recent guest blogger at The Ultimate History Project. The post explores a whimsically illustrated and persuasive Victorian era pamphlet, Dangers to Health in Our Own Home (1877), by T. Pridgin Teale (1831–1923), an eminent British surgeon. Sappol explains:
“Teale sought to educate ‘the public in the details of domestic sanitary matters’ through a ‘series of diagrams drawn, not as pictures, but as forcible expressions of facts.’ In an era when illustrated newspapers and magazines, and books like Alice in Wonderland, were captivating a mass audience, visual materials seemed to have an almost magical rhetorical power. And for Teale the diagram was most powerful of all….”
Read the entire article here:
Four English-language editions of Dangers to Health can be found in the collection of the National Library of Medicine, along with German and Italian translations. A full-text, searchable version of Dangers to Health can be found here: http://resource.nlm.nih.gov/63050790R.