Black and white movie still showing a man sitting on a couch with his arm extended out, and another man in a suit examining the seated man's hand.
All Black & White Clinical & Surgical Educational & Instructional Sound

Psychiatric Interview Films in the Age of Reform: Notes on the Depressive Neurosis Series Filmed by the University of Mississippi Medical Center in 1969

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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.

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Leprosy
Black & White Clinical & Surgical Research & Documentation Silent

Can Leprosy Be Cured?

By Magnus Vollset, PhD and Michael Sappol, PhD

Leprosy in India [Lepra in India in the original German] is a hard film to watch. In the course of its 12 minutes, it puts before the camera patients who suffer from a variety of symptoms, ranging from mild discoloration of the skin to terrible facial and bodily disfigurement, and loss of fingers and toes.

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Black & White Clinical & Surgical Research & Documentation Silent

Erdheim’s Autopsy: Dissection, Motion Pictures, and the Politics of Health in “Red Vienna”

By Tatjana Buklijas, Birgit Nemec, and Katrin Pilz

Sometime in the last century a fragment of silent film landed at the National Library of Medicine. Like many of the older films in the collection, how it got there is a mystery: no paperwork survives to tell the tale; no other prints of the film appear to have survived; no other sources on its making or showing have turned up.

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Research on Conjoined Twins
Black & White Clinical & Surgical Research & Documentation Sound

A Cinematic and Physiological Puzzle: Soviet Conjoined Twins Research, Scientific Cinema and Pavlovian Physiology

By Nikolai Krementsov, PhD

Among the many old motion pictures shelved in the collection of the National Library of Medicine is a uniquely strange two-reel 16 millimeter film, with an ungainly title: Neural and Humoral Factors in the Regulation of Bodily Functions (Research on Conjoined Twins).

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