research – Medicine on Screen

Challenge: Science Against Cancer or How to Make a Movie in the Mid-Twentieth Century

By David Cantor, PhD Instituto de Desarrollo Económico y Social (IDES), Buenos Aires

In 1949 the U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the Canadian Department of National Health and Welfare (DNHW) commissioned a cancer educational film, eventually called Challenge: Science Against Cancer. It was to be one of the first of a new form of film. The urgent task was to induce young scientists to think of cancer research and biomedicine as careers, and Challenge was to be a key part of the response.

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

By Benjamín Schultz-Figueroa, PhD, Assistant Professor in Film Studies, Seattle University

The history of animal testing and the history of the life sciences go hand in hand. Donna Haraway describes the emotional and ethical complexities with this work as the “shared suffering” of the lab. This argument is premised on the recognition of animal agency in the lab, a space where animals, apparatuses, and scientists are all responding and responsible to each other, though in very different ways.

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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.

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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.