The international exposition became a distinct public spectacle of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through a mass of exhibits, often elaborately designed and produced, representatives from all over the world assembled to sell and promote their latest products, to communicate their ideas and to capture the imagination of visitors in their thousands. The growing historiography of international expositions suggests that such spectacles have similarly captured the imagination of historians. Historians from a multitude of disciplines have analysed international expositions in their economic, social, technological and cultural contexts and have highlighted, among other factors, the importance of trade, imperialism, new technologies and architecture. In Health and Medicine on Display, Julie K. Brown, a researcher with a background in visual culture, technology and social history, provides a unique perspective on the subject by outlining the opportunities this new form of media offered for displaying new ideas in health and medicine to the public.

Divided into six chapters, the book analyses the role of health and medicine at four international expositions based in the United States: the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition, the 1893 Chicago World's Columbian Exposition, the 1901 Buffalo Pan-American Exposition and the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition (the latter analysed over two chapters). Yet Brown does much more than examine health and medicine on display at these expositions; she goes on to analyse the expositions' infrastructure and urban settings in order to provide a more complete picture of health and medicine, as she explains in the first chapter. These dual themes of exposition infrastructure and exposition display run throughout and Brown demonstrates how the exposition planners and health reformers applied advances in health and medicine in practice, both during construction and after opening. For example, she addresses the health and welfare of the huge numbers of workers employed to assemble, build and organize the exhibitions as well as the large numbers of visitors treated at the various hospital facilities for an assortment of medical complaints. Moreover, her analysis of the model housing at the 1893 exposition and the model city street at the 1904 exposition illustrates her incorporation of contempories' theories of civic improvement and urban planning into her definition of health and medicine. As she emphasizes, medical authorities during this period did not view the treatment of disease as solely a medical issue but also as a matter for which the whole society was responsible.

Brown's analysis reveals the similarities between each exposition; indeed, she argues that the medical bureau of the 1876 exposition became the basic model for other expositions in planning their medical sciences and sanitation responsibilities. In addition, the host city suffered from health problems of similar types, such as smallpox and typhoid, both prior to and during each exposition. However, Brown also highlights each exposition's distinctiveness, which provides the reader with an interesting range of subject matter. Particularities include the Civil War patriotism displayed in the 1876 exposition; the fire that ravaged the building of the Chicago exposition in 1893, killing fifteen workers and injuring many others; the chaotic attempt to deal with the assassination of President William McKinley at the 1901 exposition; and the tensions over planning between various stakeholders brought about by the sheer size and scale of the 1904 exposition.

Given its discussion of increasingly inventive methods of display in the form of dioramas, interactive exhibits and re-enactments, the book will naturally appeal to those interested in visual culture. However, the book's particular emphasis on health and medicine means it has much wider appeal. There is much of interest to both historians of medicine and historians of science. Indeed, with its emphasis on the role expositions played in communicating new medical theories in bacteriology, sanitary science, public health (or state medicine), hygiene and civic improvement to the public, this book could provide another extremely fruitful strand to current research in nineteenth-century science communication and popularization.

The book is evidence of Brown's meticulous research. She has gone far beyond the usual sources of official documentation, reports and exposition guides and uncovered evidence related to health and medicine in archives all over the United States, many at major repositories of archives of health and medicine such as the National Library of Medicine, the National Institutes of Health and the National Museum of Health and Medicine. Similarly, Brown's use of a variety of images of both displays and the construction of each exposition, most never before published, is impressive and does much to reinforce her main thesis. One particularly powerful image depicting workers constructing the roof of the building of the 1904 exposition serves to reinforce the type of health hazard the ten thousand to thirteen thousand workers faced in addition to reminding readers of the exposition's unprecedented size and scale. Indeed, Brown's evidence suggests that the 1904 exposition was the largest assembly of workers in the United States during that year.

Any criticism of this book may appear churlish. However, some further commentary on the role of medical companies and sale of medical products at these expositions would have been useful to complement discussion on exposition organizers, financiers and the municipal authorities. Further comparison with expositions held elsewhere in the world would have also been welcome, although clearly outside the scope of the study. For many readers outside the United States, a number of the details so meticulously recounted, such as names of relevant committee members, may be superfluous; and historians of British medicine may find certain topics only hold relevance for the United States health-care context. Nonetheless, this impressive survey of international expositions in relation to health and medicine has set a precedent for further study. A similar study outlining the importance of health and medicine at expositions held in Britain during this period would, without question, be a welcome addition to the historiography of this interdisciplinary area of research.