Penn’s Kislak Center hosts archival pop-up exhibit on histories of health

The Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts hosted an exhibit featuring archival materials on health as a part of Penn Libraries’ Open Access Week.

The Oct. 24 event, titled (Re)Imagining Health: a Pop-up Exhibit on the Histories of Health and Care, lasted for three hours and offered public access to a collection of historical and modern materials. The collection included books by age level and themes of health through artistic and written mediums.

The Daily Pennsylvanian spoke to Alicia Meyer, the Curator of Research Services at the Kislak Center, about her role in organizing materials to create the pop-up exhibit. 

Meyer spent several weeks leading up to the exhibit compiling “diverse” materials to answer the question: “How have people used books to examine their health?”

“Through that question,” Meyer told the DP, “I was led to different materials that we would traditionally consider to be part of health and medical archives.”

The exhibit was sponsored by the Trustees Council of Penn Women in collaboration with other Penn organizations. Meyer received a grant from the council, which helped her form the collection on “health and medicine.”

She emphasized that it is “really helpful” to be able to “relate with” another person through printed materials — whether they be one thousand years old or much more recent.

“Every day in the news and on Penn’s campus, we have to think about health care, people’s access to health care, and how we ourselves can stay healthy,” Meyer told the DP. “I think that all of these books provide an insight into how someone else navigated that same experience.”

Yvonne Yan, the Literacy Project & Planning Manager in the Penn Libraries Community Engagement Department, helped curate a collection of children’s books about health for the exhibit. 

Yan told the DP that she selected works from the PLCE department’s larger children’s book collection to showcase four different categories — “self care, losing a loved one, body positivity, and establishing boundaries.”

“We firstly wanted to highlight that health is important from a young age,” Yan said. “We want younger kids to have an understanding or broader exploration of health itself and about their own identity, their own body, and things like that.”

Yan added that she wants to “introduce the idea that picture books are for everyone.”

She also reflected on one of her favorite books from the collection titled “Why Do We Cry?” Yan explained that people can find “a deeper understanding” of themselves by recognizing the emotions that they feel in a written explanation when emotions are difficult to “talk” about.

College sophomore Sadia Islam attended the event as an extra learning opportunity offered by her health and societies course. Islam told the DP that the exhibit “supplemented” some areas that her course has “been missing.”

“[In class], we haven’t really talked about women’s voices and their experiences as much,” Islam said. “What this exhibit really did well was capturing people’s experiences. In the back, there was a section on women and abortion and another section on nursing babies.”

Islam added that the Henry Charles Lea Library — the source of many of the pieces in the exhibit — was reflected in the exhibit's final form.

“I think that the major connection to today is that we are all looking for ways to deal with health inequities and access to care, and so there’s something really powerful about not feeling alone in that experience,” Meyer added.

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