A brief clip of the Lectures to the Laity.

Dr. Iago Galdston, head of the Medical Information Bureau.

At the beginning of the 1930s the Medical Information Bureau began to actively advise the press about how medical matters should be presented to the public. Over 400 radio broadcasts were reviewed by the Bureau before it began developing broadcasts of its own, which aired as the Academy Hour on WABC and reached a national audience. The talks were presented by Fellows, and the Bureau published a booklet called On the Air to provide guidelines to presenters. By 1937, talks were airing every week of the year, and thousands of people requested print copies. Some talks were also reprinted in journals such as Hygeia, Radio Digest, and Radio Review. These weekly broadcasts came to an end in 1943. In 1945, the Academy published a volume of papers, Radio in Health Education, which were first delivered at a 1943 Committee of Medical Education conference on that topic.

  A clip of the Lectures to the Laity discussing virus research.

The first page of On the Air, the bureau’s informational pamphlet to help speakers prepare to give radio broadcasts.

In 1946, the Academy started a second radio collaboration, this one with WNYC-FM, at that time owned by the City of New York. The station began by broadcasting talks that were part of an already existing series on culture and medicine that started in 1935 as The Laity Lectures, later renamed Lectures to the Laity. By the middle of 1950, this series was joined by For Doctors Only, broadcasting professional meetings, conferences, and roundtable discussions held at the Academy. More than 1,500 original lacquer discs of these recordings moved from the Academy to the New York Public Radio archives in 2008, and a grant from METRO, the New York Metropolitan Library Council, supported the digitization and cataloging of 40 broadcasts, which can be heard through the NYAM Lectures Broadcast by WNYC portal.