News - Capital Health Plan presents: A Picture of Health in Florida: 1830s – 1930s

The Tallahassee Museum will pay tribute to early practices of medicine -- including country doctors, traditional native practices, and struggles against epidemics -- in a meticulously researched exhibit titled A Picture of Health: in Florida: 1830s-1930s.

The exhibit presents a rich array of objects, historical medical artifacts, photographs, quotations, and text panels – along with re-enactments, workshops and Discovery Tables -- to give visitors a virtual tour of yesteryear Florida’s health-care landscape, from the state’s territorial days through the public health practices of the early 20th century. Exhibit topics will include:

• Florida’s two-edged reputation for healing airs and tropical fevers;
• Epidemics such as yellow fever in the 19th century and flu in the early 20th century and the innovations they inspired;
• 19th century medicine including native and folk remedies, medicinal use of native plants, patent medicines, and traveling medicine shows;
• Midwifery and childbirth;
• Black physicians and segregation;
• Hospitals, clinics, and drugstores;
• Beliefs about disease and introduction of the germ theory; and
• The movement for hygiene, sanitation and public health.

In conjunction, the Museum’s Education Department will host a Health Fair, Traveling Medicine Shows reminiscent of days gone by, day trips to historical destinations such as the John Gorrie Museum in Apalachicola, a reenactment of Civil War battlefield medicine and surgical practices, and living history portrayals of characters such as a “Granny woman,” or “roots doctor.”

Please visit the Tallahassee Museum’s website at www.tallahasseemuseum.org or call (850) 575-8684, ext. 126, for more information.