In the early twentieth century, medical doctors and social organizations devoted much time and effort to developing new ways to show people how modern science could improve their health. These doctors and organizations firmly believed that showing people was better than lecturing them, and they accordingly promoted new methodologies that would visually demonstrate the health benefits of modern science. One of the most interesting concepts that they promoted during this period was the health museum.
In 1911, from May 6 to October 31, an International Hygiene Exhibition was held in Dresden, Germany. Situated in the city's famous GroBer Garten, it occupied approximately 62 acres of the park grounds. There, representatives mostly from Germany and other European countries presented exhibits of some 20,000 objects in 70 rooms that showed how advancements in modern science could improve health and hygiene, with emphasis in the fields of history, industry and populism. One year after the International Exhibition closed, a health and hygiene museum—the first of its kind in the modern world—was built in Dresden on the Exhibition grounds.
While the United States did not officially participate in this International Exhibition, a number of American medical doctors and other Americans traveled to Dresden to see it. There is no newspaper account of anyone from Cleveland attending; however, word of the Exhibition and the new health museum in Dresden certainly reached at least one person in Cleveland, Mildred Chadsey.
Mildred Chadsey was a graduate of the University of Chicago where she earned a degree in social work. In 1910 she moved to Cleveland and two years later accepted a position in new mayor Newton D. Baker's administration as the city's first housing official. The duties of that position included serving as the city's chief sanitary inspector. Not only was Chadsey the city's first housing official; she was also one of the first women to serve in any position in Cleveland city government.
On November 27,1912, according to the Cleveland Press, Chadsey announced a plan to create a health museum in the "old East Ohio Building" then standing on Superior Avenue next to where Cleveland City Hall then stood. Over the next several years Chadsey recruited volunteers from Western Reserve University to gather information and statistics on Cleveland housing in furtherance of her museum project. However, before she could complete the project which was supported by Mayor Baker, but opposed by Cleveland City Council, Baker's term of office came to an end ,and with it, Chadsey's tenure as the city's housing official.
While Mildred Chadsey's 1912 proposal to build a health museum in Cleveland died, the idea did not. Two decades later, during the Great Depression, a number of Cleveland medical doctors and social organizations gathered together, determined to create and fund a health museum largely with private sector donations. This time, the project succeeded.
Inspired by health exhibits in the Hall of Science at Chicago's 1933-1934 Century of Progress International Exposition, and led by Dr. Lester Taylor, President of the Cleveland Academy of Medicine, 33 members of Cleveland medical community and various social organizations gathered on March 25, 1936, at the Dudley Allen Medical Library on Western Reserve University's campus to discuss how such a project might move forward in Cleveland.
Over the next four years, meetings were held, work was assigned, area dentists were invited to participate, funds were solicited, the project was incorporated under the name of the Cleveland Museum of Health and Hygiene, and displays and exhibits were prepared. Elisabeth Severance Prentiss, widow of Dr. Dudley P. Allen, a prominent late 19th and early 20th century surgeon, had promised to donate their former mansion at 8811 Euclid Avenue to the museum when the project was nearing completion. In January, 1940, she did so. That May, the last essential addition to the project was made when Dr. Bruno Gebhard, the Director of the Health Museum in Dresden, who had fled Hitler's Germany and come to the United States, agreed to become the first Director of the Cleveland Health Museum. Six months later, on November 14, the Cleveland Museum of Health and Hygiene opened its doors to the public.
In the museum's first years, the 15-room former mansion of Dr. Allen and his wife was sufficiently large for the early exhibits and displays of the museum, which included, according to an article appearing in the Plain Dealer on January 19, 1941: a model of a woman's head showing the size and location of various organs; a display revealing the number of babies born and the number of people who died each day in Cleveland, a display using a photograph of Public Square and the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument to illustrate the number of blood cells in the human body; X-rays and skeletons of the human body; height and weight measuring devices; eye tests; and a display which taught practical tips for ensuring safety while lifting heaving objects.
One of the most interesting acquisitions by the Health Museum in its early years was that of the two alabaster statues of a nude woman and man, named respectively Norma and Normman. They were the work of obstetrician Robert Dickinson and sculptor Abram Belskie. Purchased by the Museum for $15,000, the female statue drew the most attention from patrons, especially after the Museum and the Plain Dealer co-sponsored a contest to find an area woman whose measurements were most like hers.
Within five years after the Museum opened, the Allen mansion became too small for its displays and exhibits, which became larger, more numerous, and more complex. In 1946, as the result of a large donation from James Bohannon, then president of the Brewing Corporation of America (producer of Carling's Black Label beer), the Museum purchased the former Lyman Treadway mansion at 8917 (later renumbered 8911) Euclid Avenue, which was larger, located on more land, had more outbuildings, and was just several houses up the street from the Allen mansion.
By 1947, in its new location and guided by Director Gebhard, the Cleveland Health Museum had exceeded all expectations and had become a museum which drew tens of thousands of visitors, while also providing training to hundreds of area medical personnel. By this date, the museum had more than 50,000 exhibits aimed at showing Clevelanders how to be and stay healthy.
In the early years of the museum's stay at the Treadway mansion, several of the exhibits stood out more than others. One was the Transparent Women who arrived at the Museum in 1950, and who, after another contest, this time sponsored by the Cleveland Press and the Museum, became known as Juno. Another was a mechanical human brain that was so large that it was necessary to build a separate pavilion onto the front of the Treadway mansion in 1966 to house it.
As the museum continued to grow, its board of directors planned another addition to the Treadway mansion much larger than the glass pavilion built in 1966. In 1970, the Museum board proposed to construct a one-story Mediterranean sand color brick building to the front of the current museum that would add 55,000 square feet to the Museum. The new addition included octagonal exhibition halls and a theater that would seat 155 people, as wells as "20,000 square feet . . . devoted to creating 13 experimental audio-visual teaching laboratories, a reference center, and 16 offices," according to an article in the Cleveland Press on June 22 of that year. Construction of the new addition, as well as of an expanded parking lot on the north end of the property was completed and the new wing opened to the public on May 14, 1972.
For the next two decades, the Health Museum operated both as a museum and as an educational facility for school children. According to an article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer on July 9, 1978, each year 50,000 students coming from as far as 4000 miles from Cleveland visited the museum to attend a two-hour class with one of the museum's 15 special health instructors.
By the 1990s—a decade which saw extraordinary changes in downtown Cleveland, including the building of new playing facilities for all three of Cleveland's major sports teams, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum, and the Great Lakes Science Center—the Health Museum was becoming old and outdated, with a number of its exhibits not even working. Visitor attendance dropped nearly ten percent between the years 1992 and 1995, falling from 102,148 to 92,262.
In 1998, the Museum Board of Directors, which was chaired by well-known Cleveland physician and television personality Dr. Theodore Castele, decided that, in order to successfully compete with other public institutions in Cleveland, a new health museum should be built to replace the aging yellow brick, windowless building on Euclid Avenue. In addition to the construction a new museum building, the plans called for replacement of all of the museum's health exhibits—except for Juno, the transparent woman, and the 18-foot tooth display—and the restoration and renovation of the Henry W. White mansion just east of the museum, to serve as an administrative office building for the museum. Also, sadly, the plans called for the demolition of the Treadway mansion which had housed the museum for more than 50 years. The total cost of the project was expected to be between $18 and $28 million.
By 2000, the White mansion was restored, and three years later, on February 15, 2003, the new museum, renamed HealthSpace, opened to the public. Unfortunately, the new construction placed the museum more than $17 million in debt. Moreover, visitors did not respond to the new museum in the large numbers anticipated, possibly preferring to visit the new Great Lakes Science Center downtown on the newly developed Cleveland lakefront. In fact, the number of visitors to HealthSpace actually declined after the new facility was built. In 2005, only fifty-eight thousand people visited HealthSpace, almost fifty percent less than the number who visited the museum in the 1990s before the new museum building was built.
Struggling with debt, the Board of Directors of Health Space announced in January 2006 that they would be selling the new museum building to the Cleveland Clinic and moving to a new location. The price that the Clinic paid for the building was exactly the same amount as the construction debt owed by the museum. Months later, the museum announced that it would be merging with the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. The two museums had been supportive of each other ever since the Health Museum first opened in 1940. The merger was completed effected January 1, 2007, one day after the Health Museum closed its doors on Euclid Avenue for good.
Today (2026), a recently rebuilt Cleveland Museum of Natural History contains a number of exhibits directly related to human health. In addition, and perhaps even more importantly, the Natural History Museum, in its new facility, presents many interactive exhibits just as early twentieth century medical doctors and other health professionals first proposed to teach health and hygiene: Do not lecture your patients; show them. Applied at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, this method may just also be the best way to show visitors how the natural world works.
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