"Do not spit": a South Vietnamese tuberculosis poster in the JUSPAO series

A 1965 color poster from the Health Education Service of the South Vietnamese Ministry of Health tells readers not to spit, to stop the spread of tuberculosis. It shows people spitting beside a Saigon bus. The National Archives holds it in the JUSPAO psychological warfare poster series.

What it shows

A line of people waits beside a bus with the destination sign "1 Saigon." A passenger leans out of a window and spits; a man in the queue spits on the ground. The artist draws the droplets in the air, drifting toward the people standing nearby. The text is short and printed in capitals.

ĐỪNG KHẠC NHỔ

ĐỂ CHẤM DỨT SỰ LAN TRUYỀN CỦA BỆNH LAO

SỞ GIÁO DỤC Y TẾ - BỘ Y TẾ

8-847(16) 2558

Who issued it

The imprint names the Health Education Service of the Ministry of Health of the Republic of Vietnam. The National Archives files it among the Psychological Warfare Posters of the Vietnam War in Record Group 306, the USIA records, and FRAME notes it was printed in the JUSPAO series. The series is NAID 561393; the item number is 306-VP-8-11. The catalog dates it 1965, and the slug carries the series span 1965 to 1969.

How to read it

This is the plainest kind of state messaging: a health instruction with a named issuer and a reason attached. Tuberculosis does spread through the air, and the poster's advice was sound. FRAME still tags it a fear appeal, because the picture works by making the viewer feel the spray land on the people in the queue. That is a fair technique for a fair message, and many public health posters use it.

Two things are worth noticing. First, the issuer is printed on the sheet, so a reader knew whose advice it was. That is better practice than an unsigned sheet. Second, a health poster sitting in a psychological warfare file is itself a fact about the war. Here a health instruction was printed in the same series as the war's persuasion, and that blurs what a public health message is for.

Compare the Alliance for Progress sheet Public Health with the Alliance, which shows health work without any instruction, and the story of an industry that argued against a health finding at home, Tobacco's "no proof" campaign.