By Isabella Zarate
If you’ve ever been to The Museum of the Grand Prarie, you are familiar with the detailed exhibits and their passion for the Champaign County community. It’s evident that the Museum staff has a dedication to history as they continuously are working to bring the past to life.
One way the Museum does this is by introducing a new special exhibit every few years. It just so happens that this is the year for a new exhibit.
Museum curator, Mark Hansen, explained these special exhibits as “shorter-term explorations of topics.”
Starting Saturday, May 21, the public will be able to visit the museum and explore the new exhibit, “A History of Healing: Infectious Diseases and the Community Responses to Defeat them,” which will take guests through a history of infectious diseases as well as how the community responded over the years. In lieu of everything going on in the world, the exhibit will include COVID as one of the diseases along with the various stories told by community members.
According to Hansen, the current pandemic was ultimately what influenced this year’s exhibit. With COVID impacting life as we know it, many people see the concept of diseases as new and seemingly unheard of; however, Hansen shared how “infectious disease has been causing problems for as long as folks have been around.”
“One of our goals is to give folks some perspective about where COVID sort of falls into our history, especially in relation to some of these other diseases that people had to [live through].”
While not every detail of the exhibit is set and stone there are a few things guests can expect. For one, Hansen described how the exhibit will be broken down into a brief introduction section. Here, guests will learn a little bit about infectious disease and what it means. Following the basics, the exhibit will offer an overview of vaccines and immunizations describing where they came from and how they can make an impact. Additionally, there will also be a small section on healthcare workers because you can’t talk about community response to disease without talking about healthcare professionals.
“But the bulk of the exhibit is broken down by diseases,” Hansen explained. “Each of the diseases we are covering has a section.”
In this part of the exhibit, guests will be taken through basic information of each disease including what it is, what symptoms it has, and how it impacted the community at large.
Each different disease will follow a similar design, with the section on COVID being an exception. In the COVID section, there will be introductory materials just like the other diseases; however, Hansen explained how the layout will look different.
“We’re gonna have multiple cases where we’re currently collecting stories from the community and so we’re sort of letting our community tell the story of COVID.”
With the exhibit going from past to present, Hansen shared how the hope is that the information becomes relatable to the community.
“Just because of our current experiences maybe [guests will be] able to find a connection to the folks who endured some of these other diseases in a way they couldn’t have before because they never really experienced anything like that, and now, unfortunately, we’ve all had to,” he said.
For more up-to-date information and details refer to the Champaign County Forest Preserve District on Facebook.
