Health and Medicine on Display: International Expositions in the United States, 1876–1904

Driven by profit, American organizers viewed public health issues in economic terms rather than from the perspective of public safety and community infrastructure, which created tension between exposition organizers and local public health officials. In Buffalo, for example, a city in which local public health officials integrated bacteriology and other medical advances into city policies, the expositions Medical Department devised a complex system to manage concessions, sanitation, and the expositions water supply. Yet even in a city that employed contemporary public health strategies, Brown finds that exposition organizers devalued public health efforts by funding these services at a lower rate than emergency services and by hiring military specialists to supervisory positions rather than local health officials who had the most knowledge and experience in the field.