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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

Copyright Producers Releasing
Stills from Let My People Live
Other Films Directed by Edgar Ulmer
Digitized Films on Tuberculosis at the National Library of Medicine
Explore films on tuberculosis in the NLM Digital Collections
Tuberculosis Films 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.