biomedicalephemera:

Look carefully at this fish. It may bring you good fortune!

No, no, coelacanths aren’t the fish of Yeh-Shen, but they were referred to as the “Wish Fish” in many telegrams between JLB Smith and his colleagues in Grahamstown and back in England - though there had been reports of a “foul-tasting, oily, hideous fish” going around for decades, it seemed that since the first specimen was recovered intact, all of the reports evaporated like magic. No one heard of any new “uglyfish” caught by locals, no one caught any in the tedious trawling missions sent out by Rhodes University, nothing.

The first report of a new intact Coelacanth that had been caught by a local who had seen a reward poster happened at a most inopportune time: two days before Christmas Eve! Oh, it may seem like the perfect Christmas gift to Smith, looking back, but at the time it was a disaster. The fish had been caught out on the Cape, the other side of the country! And to make things worse, the next day was a Sunday, followed by Christmas Eve, Christmas, and Boxing Day. There would be no way Smith could get to the fish in time to preserve it for science, because, as one visiting Portuguese friend once noted to him:

You may talk of Russia and the Iron Curtain, but it is nothing to South Africa on a Sunday or a holiday. That is an Iron Curtain. It shuts down, boom, boom, everything like that, and everything is dead!

A Sunday followed by three Bank Holidays was the worst possible outcome, especially since the trawler that the fish had come in on had to ship out again the day after Boxing Day.

Through an agonizing maze of run-arounds and unreachable telegraph lines, Smith and his team did eventually manage to stall the trawler one day, and alert the Prime Minister on Boxing Day that they (the Grahamstown team) had secured a coelacanth. Though by many he was considered an antagonist to the sciences, and doubly so to an extremely English center such as existed in Grahamstown, he saw the magnitude of this news, and saw what a boon it would be to South Africa to be able to announce it as soon as possible. With direct orders from the Prime Minister, the Minister of Defense procured a light airplane that could take Smith where he needed to go to retrieve the fish, and Smith’s team made preparations to announce everything on 27 December.

The Search Beneath the Sea: The Story of the Coelacanth. J. L. B. Smith, 1956.

Look carefully at this fish. It may bring you good fortune!

No, no, coelacanths aren’t the fish of Yeh-Shen, but they were referred to as the “Wish Fish” in many telegrams between JLB Smith and his colleagues in Grahamstown and back in England - though there had been reports of a “foul-tasting, oily, hideous fish” going around for decades, it seemed that since the first specimen was recovered intact, all of the reports evaporated like magic. No one heard of any new “uglyfish” caught by locals, no one caught any in the tedious trawling missions sent out by Rhodes University, nothing.

The first report of a new intact Coelacanth that had been caught by a local who had seen a reward poster happened at a most inopportune time: two days before Christmas Eve! Oh, it may seem like the perfect Christmas gift to Smith, looking back, but at the time it was a disaster. The fish had been caught out on the Cape, the other side of the country! And to make things worse, the next day was a Sunday, followed by Christmas Eve, Christmas, and Boxing Day. There would be no way Smith could get to the fish in time to preserve it for science, because, as one visiting Portuguese friend once noted to him:

You may talk of Russia and the Iron Curtain, but it is nothing to South Africa on a Sunday or a holiday. That is an Iron Curtain. It shuts down, boom, boom, everything like that, and everything is dead!

A Sunday followed by three Bank Holidays was the worst possible outcome, especially since the trawler that the fish had come in on had to ship out again the day after Boxing Day.

Through an agonizing maze of run-arounds and unreachable telegraph lines, Smith and his team did eventually manage to stall the trawler one day, and alert the Prime Minister on Boxing Day that they (the Grahamstown team) had secured a coelacanth. Though by many he was considered an antagonist to the sciences, and doubly so to an extremely English center such as existed in Grahamstown, he saw the magnitude of this news, and saw what a boon it would be to South Africa to be able to announce it as soon as possible. With direct orders from the Prime Minister, the Minister of Defense procured a light airplane that could take Smith where he needed to go to retrieve the fish, and Smith’s team made preparations to announce everything on 27 December.

The Search Beneath the Sea: The Story of the Coelacanth. J. L. B. Smith, 1956.

1975 WHO Smallpox Eradication Campaign Poster

Reward of $1000 (or $1000 converted to the local currency) offered for any confirmed human-to-human smallpox cases reported. The poster is promoting a world free of smallpox. It looks more like a warning that we’ll be given smallpox if we don’t do what we’re told to do.

From official World Health Organization archival materials.

biomedicalephemera:

After you cure your cold with cigarettes, cure your addiction to cigarettes with narcotics!

“Ewwww, girls have cooties!” takes on a completely different meaning when you know what “cooties” really are.

Typhus was a horrible disease. In the trenches, epidemic typhus caused a fatality rate between 10 and 40% depending on the outbreak, despite treatment (since antibiotics were not around yet). In WWI and WWII, millions of deaths, most civilian, occurred because of typhus outbreaks. Anti-typhus campaigns were almost completely geared towards the military until after 1945, when serious eradication campaigns began throughout Europe. Notable casualties of typhus - Anne Frank and her sister Margot both succumbed just weeks before Allied troops liberated the camp.

**Don’t confuse typhus with typhoid fever! They occurred in the same areas a lot of the time, but are completely different diseases, with completely different methods of transmission.

defrag:

Sascha Maurer, Carelessness means death, 1943

: catalogue.swanngalleries.com

1938 WPA poster advising people to consult their physician if they have a cold. Not really sure what the physician could do, as a cold is a virus that has to pass on its own, but I suppose in times like that, monitoring someone to make sure pneumonia didn’t develop was probably a good idea.

1938 Anti-Venereal Disease WPA poster

My grandpa was kept in first grade until he was- no joke- THIRTEEN. Eyesight testing didn’t start in Kentucky until 1925, and as soon as they started that they noticed that he was blind as a bat and only was able to pretend that he had the slightest clue what was going on because he was using shadows and hearing. They knew he wasn’t stupid since he was still picking stuff up, but he couldn’t read at ALL. He actually ended up graduating a year of the rest of his class because he loved learning like a mofo. He eventually died while reading a chess strategy book. o_O

Ummm, I feel like I missed something critical in my Animal Disease and Zoonoses class…did dinosaurs get syphilitic? Is that what caused them all to die out?

Poster promoting getting screened for TB from 1935. TB often took months to years to manifest noticeable symptoms in healthy people in their prime, but they were still contagious even before any symptoms showed. By getting screening and treatment when they had any TB at all (before symptoms occurred), they protected those around them and prevented problems in the future.

Japanese public health poster on the spreading of cholera and how to stop it.

After you cure your cold with cigarettes, cure your addiction to cigarettes with narcotics!

Cure your colds with cigarettes!