? ? Amended and Revised: ? ? The project focuses on examining and understand the representations of hearth and medicine in the practices and displays at international expositions. It addresses two distinct but interrelated queries: first, how officials of international expositions coped with constructing healthy places for workers and visitors in terms of medical services, sanitation facilities, safe water, and prevention of contagious disease; and second, how exposition exhibitors including government and private groups imagined, organized, and fabricated displays using conventional and innovative formats to convey current issues on medicine and health. Four international expositions have been selected spanning thirty critical years of the Gilded Age and the early years of the Progressive era beginning with the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition, the 1893 Chicago Exposition, the 1901 Buffalo Exposition, and ending with the 1904 St. Louis Exposition. ? ? The interdisciplinary approach of this study relies on integrating the perspectives and tools of social history, cultural and visual studies, as well as the history of medicine in order to assess the exposition as a distinct cultural event within which the complex process of representing the practices and displays of health and medicine took place. This publication will contribute to the increasing literature on the visual representation of medicine and health by focusing specifically on understanding expositions as sites of health and the ways in which people were connected to and made aware of health issues at these events. ? ? ? ?
