Countway's Center for the History of Medicine is pleased to announce that Prescriptions for Peace, a new exhibit on physician anti-nuclear activism from 1961 to 1985, is now on view on floors 1, L1, and L2 of the Countway Library.
In 1961, a group of doctors formed Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) to educate the American public on the health consequences of the testing and potential deployment of nuclear weapons. As the Cold War again intensified in the early 1980s, PSR gave rise to International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW), which united Soviet and American doctors in shared warning about the untenability of a medical response to nuclear war and ultimately grew into a global movement comprised of more than 200,000 members.
For decades, PSR and IPPNW leveraged their medical authority to classify the geopolitical issues of the nuclear age as threats to individual and public health that required their professional intervention. This exhibit, curated by graduating Harvard Medical School student Katie Blanton and Heather Mumford, Archivist for the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, traces the creation of a medical model for anti-nuclear activism from the early 1960s to the internationalization of that model in the early 1980s. Listening stations on L1 and L2 will provide access to digitized 1980s television broadcasts from the Center's International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War records and from the manuscript collections of the Harvard faculty dedicated to its work.
The exhibit is open to anyone with a Harvard University ID during Countway's open hours and to the public on Saturdays between 10:00 and 4:00pm.
Kick-starting the exhibit is a January 28 talk by Katie Blanton, who recently completed a master’s degree in public health at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. Her undergraduate thesis, “The Doomsday Doctors: Medical Activism in the Nuclear Age, 1960–2000,” won Harvard’s Thomas Temple Hoopes Prize for outstanding scholarly research and excellence in the art of teaching.
Check our calendar for upcoming tours with exhibit co-curator Heather Mumford and our Anti-nuke Zine Party in February.