Clinical & Surgical – Medicine on Screen

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.

September 18, 2023October 13, 2023

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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Anatomical illustration showing forceps around the head of a fetus.

July 16, 2019June 2, 2023

A Bit of Hollywood in the Operating Room

By Caitjan Gainty, PhD

Dr. Joseph DeLee’s obstetrical training films were made to instruct those less experienced and demonstrate to the medical profession that obstetricians were every bit the consummate professionals.

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June 23, 2016January 8, 2020

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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March 4, 2016January 15, 2020

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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September 14, 2015February 10, 2023

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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September 17, 2014January 6, 2020

The Cinema of Schizophrenia

By Mark S. Micale

Schizophrenia was a new diagnosis in interwar American medicine. Invented in 1911 by Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler (1857–1939), the term gradually supplanted “dementia praecox,” which after World War I was associated too closely with German psychiatry.

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June 6, 2014February 13, 2023

Copper Masks and Faceless Men…

By Zoe Beloff

A tiny, black-robed woman scurries down a deserted street and ducks into an alley overgrown with ivy.

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The next essay for Medicine on Screen 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.

Journey into Self (1968)

This is a filming of the first session of an intensive basic encounter group led by Dr. Carl Rogers, widely known for developing a client-centered approach to psychotherapy and as a founder of humanistic psychology, and Dr. Richard Farson, a founder of the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute. The session features eight previously-unacquainted persons from different regions of the United States, participating in a loosely structured, conversational “encounter,” a form of group therapy.