Visit to Museum of Medical History in HamburgSpecial Exhibition: ‘Pandemic, Flashback to the Present’

22 March 2023

Photo: Lesley Branagan

On March 22, 2023, the Knowing Vaccines team visited the medical history museum in Hamburg for a guided tour of the special exhibition ‘Pandemic, Flashback to the Present’. The exhibition was held in the historic building featuring a former auditorium in which the visuals of Covid-19 variants were mapped on the wall, and a former dissecting room with a display for each autopsy table.

The Exhibition addressed the interesting history of medicine in the context of epidemics as a history of progress in hygiene procedures. It draws on multiple connections to former epidemics in the world, specifically in Hamburg, and shows many interrelations of Covid-19 government measures of the present to medical developments in the past. For example, the discussion during the plague of 1918 of keeping the Hamburg harbour open, where a fifth of the Hamburg population died, is closely related to the urgency of decisions and unforeseen consequences during the current epidemic, like closing schools.  The importance of social media in shaping the discourse of a health crisis is shown by various pamphlets from 1831 depicting the cholera crisis. Even wrong paths have continuity. When Donald Trump prescribed hydroxychloroquine as a Covid-19 drug, he continued old traditions: quinine had already been vehemently recommended against cholera and flu. Caricatures from the 19th century illustrate that anti-vaccination activists and conspiracy theories existed 200 years ago.

After the tour, the PhD students attended a panel discussion that featured Thorsten Logge, (co-founder of the coronarchiv within the Department of Public History at the University of Hamburg) and Catharina Köhnke (PhD, currently working on a project “CoronaArchivare”). Together with moderator Anna Götz, they discussed how the corona epidemic is “something historic”, from whose sources we will be able to write this history in the future. Both their projects are dedicated to harvesting traces of the pandemic from the public and encounter the difficulty of a misbalance in representation.