“This man represents China”: The Racist Rhetoric of “object lessons” in W. W. Peter’s Health Lectures

Abstract William Wesley Peter was an American medical missionary who performed ambitious visual health campaigns in China from 1915 to the early 1920s. Crucial to many of the exhibits used in his performances was the human figure, be it drawn, modeled, mechanical, or real. The primary purpose of this study is to critically argue that his body-based “object lessons” manifest racist and colonial ideals beyond their primary function of health education. The study begins by presenting a brief history of American Medical Missionaries in China and related American–Chinese socio-political tensions. An overview of contemporary health exhibits in the USA is presented prior to a case study that closely examines, for the first time, six of W. W. Peter’s exhibits and their visual and performed characteristics. Analysis is based upon primary sources from the Kautz Family YMCA Archive, comprising letters, photographs, reports, and newspaper articles. The exhibits were found to reflect four tropes of racist and colonial discourse: categorization, affirmation, debasement, and negation. Tropes were visually evident by using the human form to segment and compare, infantilizing the audience through the use of doll-like figures and “backwarding” via depiction of empty heads. The study provides original insights into the visual strategies and colonial rhetoric of early twentieth-century health exhibitions, contributing to scholarship in critical colonial design and the history of health exhibition design.