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Zoom Link to Lecture: https://pshealth.zoom.us/j/93869943554 

The National Library of Medicine’s traveling exhibit, Pictures of Nursing: The Zwerdling Postcard Collection, represents the changing vision of nursing and the dynamic interaction between health and society that coincided with the ‘Golden Age’ of postcards in American visual culture. Nurses as therapeutic agents themselves, promoting health and preventing illness, interacted with patients in their physically and psychologically embodied places, in the context of a shifting locus of nursing practice that had expanded into the community and greater society. Mirroring the nurse’s mobility through the environment, postcards served as an equally mobile extension of the nurse’s practice and image. Through various forms of circulation and exchange, postcards depicted and disseminated intentionally cultivated visions and stories of nursing. These highly visible public health messages, proliferating powerful attitudes throughout public and private spaces, consciously portrayed the visual construct of nursing. As both reflective and aspirational imagery, postcards charted nursing’s professional identity, knowledge, status, therapeutic role, and relationship to health and environment through accessible, exchangeable, and tangible visual stories.

About the speaker: Dr. Rachel Allen is an assistant research professor of nursing at Penn State University’s College of Nursing, Family Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner, Fellow at the Barbara Bates Center for the Study of the History of Nursing at the University of Pennsylvania, and a Jonas Nurse Leader Scholar. Her research focuses on nursing history, psychiatric nursing, mental health policy, and the broad social history of deinstitutionalization. Dr. Allen’s research contains both a chronic illness and community focus, centering around individuals living with serious and persistent mental illness.