Ebling Library is hosting the National Library of Medicine’s latest traveling exhibit, Pictures of Nursing: The Zwerdling Postcard Collection.
The banners will be displayed the the Health Sciences Learning Center at 750 Highland Ave., just outside Ebling Library on the 2nd floor landing. The exhibit runs from May 13th through June 22nd, 2019.
The exhibit explores a unique archive of 2,588 postcards and over 100 years of images of nurses and the nursing profession from around the world, investigating the hold these images exert on the public imagination—then and now.The postcard is a fleeting and widespread art form influenced by popular ideas about social and cultural life in addition to fashions in visual style. Nurses and nursing have been the frequent subjects of postcards for over one hundred years. In fact, no other art form has illustrated the nursing profession so profusely using such a variety of artistic styles and images.
These images of nurses and nursing are informed by cultural values; ideas about women, men, and work; and attitudes toward class, race, and national differences. By documenting the relationship of nursing to significant forces in 20th-century life, such as war and disease, these postcards reveal how nursing was seen during those times.
The six-banner traveling exhibition highlights only a small selection from the 2,588 postcards of The Zwerdling Postcard Collection, but over 500 more are available to view in the exhibition’s online digital gallery.
Questions? Please contact the School of Nursing’s liaison librarian, Mary Hitchcock, mary.hitchcock@wisc.edu or 608 263-9332
After viewing Pictures of Nursing, come up to the Historical Reading Room on the 3rd floor and visit Ebling’s own exhibition, Staggering Losses: World War 1 & the Influenza Pandemic of 1918, which also includes postcards, and the inclusion of nurses in its narrative.