Behind the Scenes – Medicine on Screen

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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Shared Suffering Onscreen: Animal Experiments and Emotional Investment in the Films of O.H. Mowrer

The history of animal testing and the history of the life sciences go hand in hand. Yet as Ben Schultz-Figueroa argues in this essay, these experiments were always fraught, as scientists had to manage their own emotional entanglement with their animal subjects, who often were killed or maimed in the process of the experiment. This is the “shared suffering” of the lab, and Schultz-Figueroa’s work prompts us to think about it not only as a guidepost for understanding the ethics of animal experiments but also as a methodological tool to understand visual images, specifically films, from the history of science. Mowrer’s films contain traces of the burdened relationship between him and his rodent test subjects.

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