Let My People Live

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DATE: 1938

LENGTH: 14 min

CATEGORY: Educational & Instructional, Sound, Black & White

DIRECTOR: Edgar Ulmer

PRODUCER/PUBLISHER: National Tuberculosis Association, Tuskegee Institute

Summary

From the late 1930s through the early 1940s, low-budget filmmaker and perennial Hollywood underdog Edgar G. Ulmer (1904-1972) directed several educational health shorts for the National Tuberculosis Association (NTA), an organization founded in the early 1900s to raise money to combat TB. The NTA also ran a massive educational campaign, using film as one medium to reach the public. These films admirably served the educational mission of the media-savvy NTA, but were not mere promotional products. They are also the work of a director with a unique understanding of the role germs—literal and metaphorical—play in the American social fabric. Germs, and a unique notion of fate’s communicability and the hand human beings have in the chain of actual or conceptual contagion, unite Ulmer’s body of work, which included many theatrical productions as well. This film was part of a series the NTA sponsored in an effort to reach communities where TB still lingered, in this case African-Americans….Read The Essay

Supplementary Materials

Portrait of Edward Ulmer

Stills from Let My People Live

A black doctor sits at a desk and speaks to a black patient.

It’s important to get tested for TB.

Let My People Live, 1936 National Library of Medicine #

A black doctor examines a black man with a stethescope.

Let me listen to your lungs.

Other Films Directed by Edgar Ulmer

Another to Conquer

Cloud in the Sky

They Do Come Back

Digitized Films on Tuberculosis at the National Library of Medicine

Explore films on tuberculosis in the NLM Digital Collections

Tuberculosis Films on Circulating Now

Medicine, Mortality, Faith and Film — Read *Medicine, Morality, Faith and Film*and view the related films on *Circulating Now.*

TB: A Killer Then, A Killer Now — Read *TB: A Killer Now, A Killer Then* and view the related film on *Circulating Now.*

External Resources

Medfilm

MedFilm is a European-based collaborative project analyzing medical film.

See the MedFilm record for Let My People Live.

Discover more films from the NLM historical collections featured in MedFilm.

More Medicine on Screen

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