Public health posters have been used in Croatia for the last hundred years as a means of advertising in actions to educate citizens about health, and especially in the fight against infectious diseases.

In the public health ideology of Andrija Štampar, which has dominated Croatian health care since the 1920s, disease is perceived through the metaphor of a threatening danger – as an enemy carrying out a social and physical invasion, against which the entire society must fight. The category of social disease is introduced, so individual battles against disease are gradually replaced by mass ideological mobilization, whose campaign is aimed at saving or treating the entire society. Such an organicist approach to society encouraged doctors who previously worked exclusively in the clinical sphere to become active participants in public health actions and health educators. Although with the opening of the Institute for Social Medicine in Zagreb in 1924, health education became a firmly institutionalized activity, it was only with the establishment of the School of Public Health in Zagreb in 1926 that this segment of health care took off. The School of Public Health, namely, becomes the main coordinator of the overall health-educational work by starting the production of films and posters as well as other promotional material. In addition to the Antituberculosis Dispensary led by Vladimir Ćepulić, the Society for the Suppression of Tuberculosis in Zagreb played a very important role in the fight against tuberculosis, also founded under his leadership in 1928 with the aim of instructing the public on how to protect themselves from tuberculosis and to motivate them to give a moral and material support in building an anti-tuberculosis organization. The Society tried to achieve this by all means of permanent propaganda, and especially by organizing the Days of the Fight against Tuberculosis every year.

This virtual collection presents public health posters that the Croatian Museum of Medicine and Pharmacy took over from the Division for History of Medical Sciences of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts after its foundation. They were preserved as part of the documentary material from the collection of Vladimir Ćepulić, the most active participant in the fight against tuberculosis in Zagreb.

The collection contains posters of the School of Public Health, the Antituberculosis Dispensary, the Society for the Suppression of Tuberculosis and the Medical Club, issued in Zagreb between 1926 and 1937. The posters of the School of Public Health are characterized by a clear and strong visual message in which the image dominates in relation to the text (for example: Do not go to infectious patients; When you cough, put a tissue in front of your mouth! etc.). On its posters, the anti-tuberculosis dispensary uses combinations of several images accompanied by text messages that warn of the danger of bad hygiene habits (You can get tuberculosis like this) or point to the benefits of being in the fresh air (Give children air and sun). Posters of the Society for the Suppression of Tuberculosis bring programs of events within the Days of the Fight against Tuberculosis and contain only text, often with a large red cross in the background, while the Medical Club advertises a lecture by Vladimir Ćepulić on the topic of Intellectual Professions in the Fight against Tuberculosis with a text poster from 1930.

The building was digitized by Zoran Svrtan (Museum of Arts and Crafts, Zagreb) as part of the national project e-Culture – digitalization of cultural heritage.

In the picture: “How should a tuberculosis patient behave, so that he does not infect his environment”, public health poster of the Antituberculosis Dispensary, Zagreb, between 1928 and 1930, inv. no. HMMF-4358

The collection is available on the Internet portal of the Digital Collections of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts (DiZbi HAZU) at the link: https://dizbi.hazu.hr/a/?pc=i&id=2600014