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Medicine on Screen: Films and Essays from NLM

Medicine on Screen

Films and Essays from NLM

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Educational & Instructional Black & White SoundAugust 21, 2017December 10, 2022

Edgar Ulmer, The NTA, and the Power of Sermonic Medicine

By Devin Orgeron, PhD

From the late 1930s through the early 1940s, low-budget filmmaker and perennial Hollywood underdog Edgar G. Ulmer (1904-1972) directed what appear to be eight educational health shorts for the National Tuberculosis Association (NTA).

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Ask
Educational & Instructional Animation Black & White SilentFebruary 5, 2015February 13, 2023

“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.

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Man Alive
Educational & Instructional Animation Color SoundJune 6, 2014January 15, 2020

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.

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Rodney
Educational & Instructional Animation Color SoundJune 6, 2014January 15, 2020

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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The Reward of Courage
Educational & Instructional Black & White SilentAugust 2, 2013February 14, 2023

A Rediscovered Cancer Film of the Silent Era

By David Cantor, PhD

The Reward of Courage sought to transform public ideas about cancer by encouraging people to seek help from a recognized physician at the first sign of the disease or its possibility: early detection and treatment being the ASCC’s main approach to cancer control.

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A black man in a baseball cap talks with a white man in a suit behind a desk in a wood paneled office. 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.

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Film still of a large steaming pot hung on a tripod over a fire pit. 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.

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