Got The Blues, The Mean Reds, Or The Evil Yellows? April 23, 2010

Holly Golightly Battles “The Mean Reds” At Tiffany’s Truman Capote‘s Breakfast At Tiffany’s should be required reading for psychiatrists. Nobody ever painted a more terse and pithy picture of clinical depression than Holly Golightly: “You know those days when you’ve got the mean reds… the blues are because you’re getting fat or maybe it’s been raining too long. You’re sad, that’s all. But the mean reds are horrible. You’re afraid and you sweat like hell,…

Medical Library’s Contagious Exhibit Sure To Go Viral March 5, 2010

She may be…a bag of TROUBLE. Syphilis – Gonorrhea. U.S. Public Health Service,United States, 1940s.Photomechanical print: color; 41 x 51 cm. Artist: “Christian.”A sultry, heavily-made-up woman squints provocatively, while smoking a cigarette. WWII posters usually addressed men, and fingered promiscuous women as the source of contagion. They are an unholy alliance of science, art, medicine, politics, history, advertising, and propaganda. Dramatic images use visual shorthand to convey danger, disease, and death. Shadows, crowds, skeletons, vermin,…