The University Archives and History of Medicine Collection at UB are marking the 125th anniversary of the Pan-American Exposition with an exhibit that combines, for the first time, two vivid collections that will offer visitors a new and historically revealing perspective on one of the defining moments in Buffalo’s past.

An opening event for the exhibit, “Electric City, Mortal Body,” will be held Oct. 15, at 6 p.m. in the Silverman Library 3^rd floor exhibition area on North Campus. The opening will feature a screening of early Thomas Edison films from the exposition with commentary, plus a discussion led by Cynthia Van Ness, former director of library and archives at the Buffalo History Museum and an expert on this period in the city’s history.

Registration is required for the event. The exhibit continues through next summer.

Eight million people visited Buffalo for the exposition in 1901. It was planned as a celebration of human achievement and artistic harmony among nations as the 19th century turned into the 20th. Over six months, beginning in spring 1901, the Pan-Am was meant to offer a vision of the future. But that promise turned tragic when President William McKinley was shot on the exposition’s grounds by Leon Czolgosz. McKinley died eight days later.

“That combination of spectacle and tragedy is why people are still talking about the Pan-Am 125 years later,” says Hope Dunbar, university archivist. “We wanted to mark that anniversary in a way that felt genuinely new, and not just commemorative.”

“Electric City, Mortal Body” looks at the Pan-Am’s medical story. The exposition showcased human achievement, including advances in modern medicine such as X-ray technology and live bacteriology experiments famously on display.

“When the president was shot, technology was tested in real-time,” says Dunbar, who co-curated the exhibit with Keith Mages, curator of the Robert L. Brown History of Medicine Collection at UB. “Our exhibit sits at that intersection of technological optimism and human vulnerability. It tells a side of the story that hasn’t been told before.”

The Herman Matzinger Collection and the Kerry S. Grant Pan-American Exposition Collection situate the Pan-Am’s medical history within the broader cultural context of the fair. The two collections complement each other beautifully, says Dunbar.

Matzinger was an 1884 graduate of what is today the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at UB. He conducted a postmortem bacteriological analysis of McKinley’s wounds, concluding that no poison or pathogenic bacteria contributed to the president’s death. The president had died from complications related to gangrene, directly attributed to the bullet wound. The conclusion was based on groundbreaking methods at the time and helped put to rest several rumors surrounding the assassination.

“Matzinger’s 17-page laboratory notebook provides us with a first-hand account of the techniques and pressures faced by early 20th century physicians working to determine cause of death,” says Mages. Aside from his notebook, the collection also includes his final report, personal correspondence, death certificate acknowledgment, and tickets to McKinley's funeral service.

Mages concludes, “It is an intimate picture of what it was like to be a physician at the center of one of the most consequential events in American history.”

The Grant Collection, donated by Kerry S. Grant, PhD, former dean of the UB College of Arts and Sciences and author of “The Rainbow City: Celebrating Light, Color, and Architecture at the Pan-American Exposition,” consists of maps, programs, photographs, and souvenirs that make up the fair’s visual material.

“Neither collection alone tells the full story,” says Dunbar. “Bringing them together lets us show the exposition as both a spectacle of modernity and a medical crisis in one exhibit.”

Also on display is the Dr. Roswell Park scrapbook, compiled in the aftermath of the assassination. Park was the exposition’s medical director and one of the country’s most prominent surgeons. He was in Niagara Falls performing surgery on a patient when McKinley was shot. Although rushed back to Buffalo on a private train, he arrived as the president’s procedure was just ending – in an operating room with no electricity – as physicians reflected fading sunlight off metal pans so surgeons could better see their patient’s wounds.

“That irony struck me,” says Dunbar. “It’s a detail that captures the gap between what modernity promised and what it could actually deliver.”

Dunbar says she hopes the exhibit leaves visitors with a richer sense of Buffalo’s place in history.

“The exposition promoted the idea that science and technology could improve life,” she says. “But the McKinley assassination tested that belief in the most public way imaginable.

“It’s among the reasons this story remains relevant today.”