Building Salk’s Legacy: A Community Effort

Author: Maggie Shaheen

A woman stands in front of a museum exhibit with artifacts, photos, and text panels

As a museum studies and anthropology major, I never envisioned myself spending so much time in the School of Public Health this semester, especially not on camera! Emblazoned with former professor Virgil Cantini’s “Man” sculpture, this building is a place that physically represents the university’s commitment to scientific research, especially in the health fields. In this way, it felt fitting (even as someone who hasn’t taken a biology class since high school!) to participate in the creation of a new Jonas Salk exhibit based on the School of Public Health’s recent acquisitions of lab equipment and document archives donated by Salk’s family.

While the new exhibit will soon be unveiled in the Public Health Building’s lobby and common area, one of my favorite elements of my internship experience was all of the interdisciplinary help we had from departments all across campus. The team I worked with every week included my supervisor, HAA faculty member Alex Taylor, as well as two other interns from the department, but in no way did this mean that the experience was ever insular. Some of our early projects in the exhibit included assessing the collection’s cataloged materials, selecting which objects would go on display, and cleaning the items, but the more we progressed during the semester, the more we relied on cooperation with Archives and Special Collections, University Communications, and Facilities Management. As the project came to its culmination, we also worked closely with Pitt publicists, videographers and photographers to help promote the display.

Our collaboration with all of these professionals helped us make the most of objects in the collection. In the objects at Public Health, for example, we had Dr. Salk’s personal office desk that he had used in Pittsburgh while researching the polio vaccine and later took with him to the Salk Institute in California. But without the context of his certificates and awards that the University Library System housed, the desk doesn’t make much sense or carry that much meaning. After reviewing documents in the University Library System’s Thomas Boulevard storage facility, we were able to curate a wall of awards that Salk received from institutions as diverse as the March of Dimes, the President of the United States, and even Disneyland. Honorary degrees and prizes came from as far away as Argentina and India.

Another incredible experience I had during this internship was getting to meet a 99 year-old woman who had worked as a nurse at Municipal Hospital one floor above Dr. Salk’s laboratory in the early 1950s. Reflecting on her experiences caring for patients during a private visit to the exhibit as it was being installed, Patricia Stepanchak’s stories about the troubling public health crisis was an incredible reminder of the power of oral histories to bring museum objects to life. The other interns and I went into the semester focused on presenting objects from the laboratory for display, but it was so eye-opening to see the enrichment gained from such human perspectives.

When I was first contacted about this Salk internship opportunity, I immediately knew I had to participate because of my own personal connection. My grandmother grew up on a farm in Iowa and was the oldest of her six siblings when she contracted polio around age 10. She lived in a hospital for months, separated from her family and constantly in fear until the national rollout of the vaccine after initial trials in Pittsburgh meant she could be reunited with her community. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the power of museum displays to connect with human stories that speak to the importance of public health research could not have been more personal – or more rewarding.


Maggie Shaheen, Museum Studies Intern at the Jonas Salk Collection, School of Public Health, University of Pittsburgh - Spring 2023

Constellations Group