"Liquid Poison": picturing a public health crisis through visual storytelling in the Nineteenth Century Press

Abstract

This dissertation concerns early efforts to report the news visually during the Antebellum press era in the United States. Using historical and sociological methods, news accounts of New York City's "swill milk crisis" as reported in <i>Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper</i> were examined to illuminate the role of the illustrated newspaper in the development visual journalism. It is argued that visual reporting offered a new narrative about "swill milk" as a public health crisis that reached audiences and addressed community concerns in ways that the written word alone did not. This research also connects the contributions of visual journalism to public health awareness and the development of newspapers as a mass medium in the nineteenth century.