The Lake Land College Library will host the National Library of Medicine’s most recent traveling exhibit, Pictures of Nursing: The Zwerdling Postcard Collection, throughout the month of January.
The exhibit will be housed on the main level of the Judge Learning Resource Center on the Lake Land College campus, 5001 Lake Land Blvd., Mattoon. The public is welcome to view the exhibit.
This exhibition explores a “unique archive of 2,588 postcards and more than 100 years of images of nurses and the nursing profession from around the world, investigating the hold these images exert on the public imagination, then and now.”
According to the National Library of Medicine, the postcard is a fleeting and widespread art form influenced by popular ideas about social and cultural life in addition to fashions in visual style. Nurses and nursing have been the frequent subjects of postcards for more than 100 years. No other art form has illustrated the nursing profession so profusely using such a variety of artistic styles and images. By documenting the relationship of nursing to significant forces in 20th-century life, such as war and disease, these postcards reveal how nursing was seen during those times.
This exhibition was developed and produced by the National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health.
Library hours are posted on the Lake Land College website: www.lakelandcollege.edu/library.
For more information, contact Sarah Hill, information services librarian, at 217-234-5440 or shill@lakelandcollege.edu.