Vintage Public Health Posters Show Just How Creepy The 20th Century Was

Last week, we marveled at the unnerving Chinese health posters from 1933 that showed the human body as a kind of bizarre factory. But those aren't the only weird and somewhat horrifying health posters out there. Here are a dozen or so more vintage public health posters.

Posters by Pearl Turner for Michigan Department of Health, 1924

(via Michigan Department of Natural Resources)

As old as creation, USA, 1936

(via Library of Congress)

Report dog bites, designed by Earl Schuler, 1941

(via Library of Congress)

Knock out V.D., by John Wyeth, 1942

(via U.S. National Library of Medicine)

Know Your Enemy series, WWII

(via National Museum of Health and Medicine)

Cover your cough, WWII

(via Digital Poster Collection)

Thus begins an epidemic, Denmark

(via History of Medicine)

Don't strip tease for Anopheles, an American WWII poster

(via Wikimedia Commons)

You MAY Get A Harmful Dose IF You Do Not Follow Safe Methods — a poster from the Y-12 National Security Complex, a complex built as a part of the Manhattan Project, and operated as a manufacturing facility for nuclear weapons components and related defense purposes during WWII.

(via Y12)

Terrible disease of the diphtheria – Send patients to the hospital as soon as possible and take inoculation before getting infection

(via University of Kansas Medical Center)

Go get your smallpox vaccination, c. 1956

(via U.S. National Library of Medicine)

Come and get BCG vaccine inoculation right away, c. 1965

(via U.S. National Library of Medicine)