The Cork Folklore Project’s ‘Catching Stories’ exhibition, which ran in University College Cork’s Boole Library from 16 February to 27 August 2023, is documented here through a 360-degree virtual tour, exhibition text, and visitor feedback. The broader project, a folklore-STEM collaboration which was funded by the Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) Discover programme in 2022-2023, has collected memories and experiences of a range of diseases such as polio, tuberculosis and measles from 20th and 21st century Ireland. It brings them together with biomedical commentary in an online resource, www.catchingstories.org, to explore how the experience of these diseases and related public health measures have affected Irish society. Work for this project is safeguarded in our audio archives along with other health-based interview and questionnaire collections carried out by the Cork Folklore Project (The Grattan Street Medical Centre, ‘D’Orthopaedic’, and Chronicles of COVID-19).
Vaccination programmes for diseases such as measles have been, to a degree, victims of their own success in Europe and the USA. Public health communication continues to be a huge challenge in the context of vaccination. We contributed to this conversation by listening to and sharing communities’ experiences of communicable diseases such as measles, polio and tuberculosis, and of public health initiatives. Listening to people’s experiences, and contextualising them with an account of the history of the diseases and of public health efforts to combat them, allows the two sides to inform each other. The stories and memories bring home to us the devastating impact that diseases now made rare by vaccination had on families and communities. Just as importantly, we learn about the tensions between everyday life and official initiatives, and about the trauma, stigma, and loss that often accompanied such experiences.
The Cork Folklore Project/Department of Folklore and Ethnology team, Clíona O’Carroll and James Furey, collaborated with Elizabeth Brint, of the Department of Pathology, UCC, to put these diseases in context. Dr. Brint observes: “As an immunologist, this project has really helped to highlight the importance of vaccination programmes and how such programmes have transformed our community health and wellbeing. My involvement in this project has opened my eyes to the power of individual stories in understanding the impact of public health initiatives.” The project centred on human experience: that of individuals, families and communities, from Spanish ‘Flu to COVID-19, and the exhibition foregrounded the human voice through audio installations, links to interviews, and interaction with physical objects. It invited visitors to join interviewees in the experience of manually ventilating a child with polio throughout the night in 1956 and to move along a waiting-room bench when facing vaccination by the dreaded ‘Branding Iron’, or to imagine the loss of a childhood classmate from measles. Dr Jeffrey Weeter of the Department of Music, UCC, generously supported us in designing and installing the ventilation-triggered audio and the ‘arse-activated bench’ which allowed visitors to step into the shoes of a trainee doctor and a child awaiting vaccination. Artworks by Lesley Cox also explored the impact of polio on families and communities.
More than 700 people interacted directly with our events, and exhibition feedback proved it to be thought-provoking and exciting to visitors. The exhibition was re-purposed by the Health Services Executive (HSE), and brought to St Mary’s Primary Care Centre, Cork City, in October 2023 to mark the launch of the HSE’s winter vaccination drive. Since then, it has toured multiple HSE locations, and is still touring in June 2024.
