They Do Come Back

Read the Essay | Go to NLM Digital Collections | Watch on YouTube | Read Transcript

DATE: 1940

LENGTH: 17 min

CATEGORY: Educational & Instructional, Sound, Black & White

DIRECTOR: Edgar Ulmer

PRODUCER/PUBLISHER: National Tuberculosis Association and De Frenes Studios

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 white working-class Americans….Read the Essay

Supplementary Materials

Portrait of Edward Ulmer

Stills from They Do Come Back

May I help you?

Young man holding a piece of gauze over his mouth as he coughs up blood.

Coughing.

A woman wearing a headset works at a switchboard in a factory.

Taking a smoke break.

Other Films Directed by Edgar Ulmer

Another to Conquer

Cloud in the Sky

Let My People Live

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 films on *Circulating Now.*

More Medicine on Screen

COMING NEXT

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

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.

NEW IN NLM DIGITAL COLLECTIONS

The Medicine Man (1959)

This 1959 film aims to expose quackery in medicine and nutrition, telling the story of a charlatan who peddles "VitaLife" and special diets and supplements. He offers them as a general insurance of health and a cure for all manner of ailments. Calling his salesmanship educational, he maneuvers to offer "lectures" in any location that will have him, combined with a hard sell to those in attendance. Food and drug regulators keep the public safe by exposing the quack for what he is.