US public health posters, 1917–1967

207 sheets from the FRAME snapshot, dated 1917 to 1967, on venereal disease, malaria, tuberculosis, sanitation, nutrition, blood donation and medical aid. Most were issued by federal offices for Americans; the rest were printed by U.S. agencies for readers in Nicaragua, Asia and the Middle East. Cards run in date order.

Every card here is a health sheet whose maker line names a U.S. government office, carries a Government Printing Office imprint, or sits in a National Archives series the archive credits to a U.S. agency. By issuer: the Public Health Service and its parent, the Federal Security Agency, 57; the U.S. Information Agency and its State Department predecessors, 30; the Joint U.S. Public Affairs Office (JUSPAO) in Saigon, 27; the Department of Agriculture and the War Food Administration, 20; sheets that name no issuing office, most with a Government Printing Office imprint, 16; the Army and War Department, 12; the Navy's Bureau of Medicine and Surgery and other Navy offices, 12; the Office of War Information and the Office of Defense Health and Welfare Services, 7; the Inter-American cooperative public health service in Nicaragua, 6; and the Labor Department's Children's Bureau and Women's Bureau, 5.

Two private bodies are in the grid on purpose, and they are counted separately: the American Social Hygiene Association, 9 sheets, and the American Red Cross, 6. All fifteen sit in the same National Archives file as the federal sheets, Record Group 44, and three of the four blood and plasma sheets in the grid are the Red Cross's. Neither body is a federal office, and the cards name each by its real maker.

The years are lopsided. 145 of the 207 cards are dated 1941 to 1946, the Second World War and its first year of peace. Before that the snapshot holds only two 1917 Agriculture notices and three Children's Bureau posture charts. From 1952 on, every card was printed for readers outside the United States. Most sheets have no date more exact than a year; the line under each title is the date and identifier the archive gives, and the National Archives sheets of the war years are dated by the archive, not always by a printed imprint.

Where this site has an essay, the card opens it. Otherwise it opens the FRAME record. Left out: recruiting posters for nurses and other services, Army and Navy safety and conservation posters, the 1952 germ-warfare rebuttal posters (an argument about a charge, not health advice; the Korean edition has its own page), newspaper cartoons, commercial advertisements, and Vietnamese health sheets that the records credit only to the South Vietnamese government. The reasons are on the hub page, US public health messaging, 1917–1969.