LSU Libraries Special Collections will present “Public Pathogens: Louisiana’s Historical Struggle With Disease” in Hill Memorial Library from September 29, 2025, to December 12, 2025. The exhibition examines Louisiana’s past battles with disease and the human stories that accompanied them. It is free and open to the public. 

“Public health is public wealth” was the rallying cry of the New Orleans Sanitary Association in the late nineteenth century. At the time, the tools for protecting public health—quarantines, isolation hospitals, vaccinations, purging, and mercury-based medicines— and their effectiveness were matters of passionate public debate. Those historical conflicts continue today in national debates about the role of government in the health of its citizenry, as do stories of care, hope, and sacrifice as Louisianans put themselves at risk to aid those afflicted. 

Since the founding of New Orleans in 1718, Louisianans have battled a slew of deadly epidemics and widespread diseases. As the entrepôt to the Mississippi River Valley, New Orleans opened the door to trade and commerce as well as contagion. 

LSU Special Collections holds historical materials from early statehood to the present that illuminate private and public responses to a wide variety of dangerous diseases, including yellow fever, cholera, typhoid, influenza, HIV-AIDS, and COVID-19. Yellow fever, particularly as experienced in New Orleans, is most heavily represented in the collection, but a variety of illnesses wreaked havoc simultaneously during times of war, political change, and natural disaster. Their reach extended across the state and nation to rural and urban areas alike. 

The exhibition is organized into three sections that trace Louisiana’s encounters with disease across time. The first explores the response to Hansen’s disease and features the traveling exhibition, “Leprosy: The Separating Sickness” from the Friends of Carville Historic District in Carville, Louisiana. The second shares oral history interviews with staff from Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center about the institution’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. These interviews were conducted by the LSU Manship School of Mass Communication in partnership with the hospital and LSU Libraries’ T. Harry Williams Center for Oral History. The final section features historical materials from LSU Special Collections that range from the early nineteenth century through the 1970s.

Related Event

LSU Libraries Special Collections will host a free, public talk on Hansen’s disease on November 19 at 5:30 p.m. in Hill Memorial Library. José P. Ramirez, Jr., a two-time LSU alumnus and Texas-based social worker, will discuss his memoir, Squint: My Journey with Leprosy. 

For more information, visit our events calendar.