surgery – Medicine on Screen

A still of a black and white film shows a woman in a white coat working in a lab.

July 12, 2022February 1, 2023

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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Anatomical illustration showing forceps around the head of a fetus.

July 16, 2019February 8, 2023

A Bit of Hollywood in the Operating Room

By Caitjan Gainty, PhD

Dr. Joseph DeLee’s obstetrical training films were made to instruct those less experienced and demonstrate to the medical profession that obstetricians were every bit the consummate professionals.

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March 4, 2016January 15, 2020

Erdheim’s Autopsy: Dissection, Motion Pictures, and the Politics of Health in “Red Vienna”

By Tatjana Buklijas, Birgit Nemec, and Katrin Pilz

Sometime in the last century a fragment of silent film landed at the National Library of Medicine. Like many of the older films in the collection, how it got there is a mystery: no paperwork survives to tell the tale; no other prints of the film appear to have survived; no other sources on its making or showing have turned up.

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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.

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.