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While today’s visitors to the American Museum of Natural History are entertained by swallowtails in the Butterfly Conservatory, museumgoers in 1917 were treated to a far more insidious creature: the fly. This three-dimensional model, created to emphasize the threat of illnesses posed to children in fly-infested houses, was part of a display devoted to the household pest in its public-health section, a department spurred by the widespread popularity of the museum’s 1908 tuberculosis exhibit. The message was clear: Let flies into your home (like the family on the right), and all hell breaks loose. This image is on view in the Museum Library’s Photographic Collection (Central Park West at 79th St; 212-769-5100, amnh.org).
—Erin Clements
