“Panic in the Streets”: Historical Reflections on Fear-based Media Messaging During Acute Public Health Crises

Bullitt Club Lecture Series Presents

Nancy Tomes
Distinguished professor of History, Stony Brook University

“Panic in the Streets”: Historical Reflections on Fear-based Media Messaging During Acute Public Health Crises

Hybrid event
In-person: Mary Ellen Jones Building, Room 3112 
Virtual via Zoom: REGISTER for this event

Lecture

In public health, fear-based campaigns are regarded (rightly so) with caution and concern because their side effects of stigma and scapegoating can be so toxic. Those worries have been shaped by an awareness of the formidable power of traditional media (newspapers, radio, TV) and now the “new” social media to amplify public health messaging in unexpected and undesirable ways. In this talk, Tomes will present a brief history of what she terms the “panic problem” in American public health practice to stimulate a discussion of these questions: how do we motivate people to act in a public health crisis without inducing some degree of fear? Is there a place for healthy fear in public health messaging today and if so, what would it look like? 

Speaker

Nancy Tomes is an American historian with a focus on the intersection between expert knowledge and popular understandings of the body and disease. She’s the award-winning author of four books, including The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women and the Microbe in American life, (1998) about the popularization of the germ theory of disease, and Remaking the American Patient which was awarded the prestigious Bancroft Prize in 2017, which examines an in depth research in the popular yet largely unexamined concept origin of patients “shopping” for health care. She’s also developed “Medicine and Madison Avenue”, a website in collaboration with Duke University Library’s Special Collections, which explores the complex history of health related advertising. Her current research focus is on the history of psychiatry, the impact of the Internet on doctor-patient interactions, and a comparative look at the medical consumerism in other countries.