NEWEST ESSAY & FILM
By Patrick Ellis, PhD
The Squeeze is a film replete with movement, noise, and crowds, crowds, crowds. Experimental filmmaker Hilary Harris directed this short “filmic” documentary about overpopulation, an ever-present theme in the 1960s and ’70s that was discussed in often-solemn books and cinema of the era. The Squeeze is different. The film won a Golden Gate Award for best fiction short at the 1964 San Francisco Film Festival.
Read More
By Alexander Kupfer, PhD
The Forgotten Frontier (ca. 1931) is a remarkable silent film which documents the earliest days of the Frontier Nursing Service (FNS). Launched in 1925 in Leslie County, Kentucky, the service delivered thousands of babies over many decades in remote hill country where people were poor and doctors were scarce. The Forgotten Frontier was conceived when Mary Breckinridge was searching for a new way to promote the FNS and decided a motion picture was the modern answer.
Read More
By Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece, PhD
This essay delves into The Relaxed Wife, a remarkable mid-century advertising film promoting the mild tranquilizer Atarax. Beneath a veneer of familiar 1950s stereotypes, The Relaxed Wife provides a surprising take on gender roles, the pharmaceutical industry, and the status of the artist under capitalism.
Read More
By Paula Orozco-Espinel, MA
This essay focuses on six films on “population issues” and family planning projects in Latin America, specifically Colombia. Produced by Airlie Productions during the 1970s, many of these films were supported by Profamilia—arguably the most successful associate to the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) in the world and the most important Colombian family planning organization. Together, the films illustrate some of the difficulties the population movement faced in the 1970s in promoting birth control in the Global South, some of the strategies implemented to tackle those difficulties, and the unexpected alliances that were formed along the way.
Read More
By Linnéa J. Hussein, PhD
When one thinks of audio-visual recordings of psychiatric patients in the United States in the 1960s, the distressing images of Frederick Wiseman’s observational documentary Titicut Follies (1967) may come to mind. The Depressive Neurosis series from 1969 bears no resemblance to these films. Instead, the series offers a rare glimpse into the day-to-day world of late 1960s psychiatric practice, in which people with addiction, mental illness, or mental disabilities seek help and are received with an open mind and treated with dignity by the doctors they speak to and the camera crew that films them.
Read More
By Michael Sappol, PhD
Public health and war have long been close companions. In the first terrible round of “modern wars”—the American Civil War, the Franco-Prussian War and World War I—military officials and civilian leaders called on health professionals and volunteers to help mobilize and protect military forces and civilian populations. Health experts in turn viewed these conflicts as a sort of laboratory to test and implement their theories, and an opportunity to use fresh knowledge and nascent technologies. They boarded the bandwagon to advance their professional, scientific, political, and ideological goals—and film was a medium with which to do so.
Read More
By Dwight Swanson
The National Library of Medicine is home to 83 films created by virologist Telford H. Work documenting his life’s work and travels. The films supplement Work’s manuscript collection, which covers his education, career, hobbies, and achievements. Captured between 1942 and 1988, the films were primarily shot on 16mm film, with video copies made later.
Read More
By David Cantor, PhD Instituto de Desarrollo Económico y Social (IDES), Buenos Aires
In 1949 the U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the Canadian Department of National Health and Welfare (DNHW) commissioned a cancer educational film, eventually called Challenge: Science Against Cancer. It was to be one of the first of a new form of film. The urgent task was to induce young scientists to think of cancer research and biomedicine as careers, and Challenge was to be a key part of the response.
Read More
By Benjamín Schultz-Figueroa, PhD, Assistant Professor in Film Studies, Seattle University
The history of animal testing and the history of the life sciences go hand in hand. Donna Haraway describes the emotional and ethical complexities with this work as the “shared suffering” of the lab. This argument is premised on the recognition of animal agency in the lab, a space where animals, apparatuses, and scientists are all responding and responsible to each other, though in very different ways.
Read More
By Angela Saward, BA, MTA, Wellcome Collection
Dr. Mary Catterall (1922-2015), doctor and sculptor, script and medical adviser to the film, It Takes Your Breath Away, became concerned with lung health when she was appointed Senior Registrar in Respiratory Medicine at Leeds General Infirmary, England in 1960. The film won a Silver Medal at the British Medical Association annual film competition in 1964.
Read More