By Anja Laukötter
A darkly-lit parade of twisted, deformed people slowly, painfully, marches back and forth over a map of England, as the movie soundtrack sounds anxious notes of alarm.
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).
“Stronger and Whiter Light Down Deeper and Darker Holes”: Jacob Sarnoff and the Strange World of Anatomical Filmmaking
By Miriam Posner, PhD
As a historian of medicine’s visual culture, I’ve seen some weird films. But The Blood Vessels and Their Functions (1924–1925) still took me aback.
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Commandments for Health
By Michael Rhode and Michael Sappol, PhD
Inspired by the U.S. Army’s popular “Private Snafu” animated cartoon series, late in World War II the Navy hired Hugh Harman (1908–82) to do a similar series, focused on health.
“Come with me, into the visual instruction room”
By Michael Sappol, PhD
A dentist invites a young boy: “Come with me, into the visual instruction room.” And with this, Ask Your Dentist, a silent dental film from around 1930, stages a cinematic revue of instructional techniques and tactics.
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.
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.
Cartoon Fun with Cancer, Cars and Companionate Marriage in Suburban America
By David Cantor, PhD
The release of Man Alive! in 1952 signaled a change in American anti-cancer campaigns. Since their emergence in the early twentieth century, such campaigns had focused most attention on recruiting women into programs of early detection and treatment.
Child-men, Fast Women, Venereal Nightmares and Racial Uplift…
By Mikita Brottman
Made shortly after the end of World War 2, this curious little nightmare movie addresses black soldiers. It depicts them as overgrown, impulsive, hypersexualized children who are not able to contain their primordial desires.
Disease Vectors of Cartoon Modernity
By Kathy High and Michael Sappol, PhD
It’s 1950 and a fine upstanding teenager named Rodney is stricken with the deadly tuberculosis bacterium (Mycobacterium tuberculosis).
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