Our exhibition at the Estonian National Museum in focus again
Reconstruction of the plague doctor mask and a modern protective gear for infectious diseases. Perhaps it is good that the museum is closed right now - these protective suits are a very priced commodity right now.
During 2015-2016, I had a privilege to work together with my colleagues from KAJAK, the Estonian Centre for Environmental History, and Estonian National Museum on a part of their new permanent exhibition on humans and environment. The part that I was responsible for, was a display on health and environment in Estonia in a historical perspective. Then it was a nerd choice in many ways - today it is in focus again. From the beginning of the epidemics, the images of our plague mask replica started spreading on social media. Yesterday, Alar Karis, the director of the Museum published a blog post on our materials related to small-pox mortality and early vaccination in Estonia.
Small-pox part of the display was in many ways exciting. Materials on small-pox vaccination campaigns were in many ways abundant but to grasp and visualise the context in many ways rather difficult as they principally consisted of books filled with the names of the vaccinated. But then there was an original knife for vaccination, as well as books that instructed how to do it - vaccination was carried out by local pastors, making thus sure that the vaccines also reached the remotest parts of the country. To convey that feeling and the process, we even staged a short film (freely watchable on youtube). Arguments against people who did not want to vaccinate their children remain eerily relevant for today. For a long time, we were searching for a photo of somebody with small-pox scars, but even Stalin’s photos are all retouched. In the end, University of Tartu’s History Museum found a scary series in their collection where you can see the deterioration of a small-pox patient day by day.
A man with small-pox on the 4th and 8th day of being at Tartu University Hospital in 1920s(?). I’m not sure he had a 9th day… TÜ Muuseumi fotokogu, nr ÜAM F 445:107/5 F
Choosing diseases that would be displayed at the exhibition was not so easy either. 1812 plague was something that we definitely wanted to include, but finding original objects from a disease outbreak more than 200years ago that had killed close to 80% of the population in some parts of Estonia, is very challenging. Since everybody was busy with surviving, nobody had time to actually keep track of how many people died, and most objects were destroyed, our knowledge is very scarce. In the end, the plague outbreak was represented with a short film of the archaeological excavation of Tallinn’s Santa Barbara graveyard and a running list of people who died of plague in Tallinn that keeps running and running without an end in sight. And the mask, of course, even though we have no historical documents that prove that exactly this was the design used in Estonia at that time.
This is not all of what we managed to fit into the small space dedicated to environmental history of epidemics in Estonia. There is water contamination by disposed medicine, development of quinine, emergence of sterilisation and hospital hygiene, and folk medicine, among other things. In the course of preparing it, I got to see the amazing medical and pharmaceutical collections of the Tartu University History Museum and stocked up a whole pile of material on other diseases that never made it to the exhibition and keep waiting for me to write about them.