All – Medicine on Screen

Two women having an exchange, one of whom is holding an infant in her arms.

July 9, 2024January 19, 2025

Promoting Birth Control in 1970s Colombia: Unlikely Alliances On and Off the Screen

NEWEST ESSAY & FILM
By Paula Orozco-Espinel, MA

This essay focuses on six films on “population issues” and family planning projects in Latin America, specifically Colombia. Produced by Airlie Productions during the 1970s, many of these films were supported by Profamilia—arguably the most successful associate to the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) in the world and the most important Colombian family planning organization. Together, the films illustrate some of the difficulties the population movement faced in the 1970s in promoting birth control in the Global South, some of the strategies implemented to tackle those difficulties, and the unexpected alliances that were formed along the way.

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Black and white movie still showing a man sitting on a couch with his arm extended out, and another man in a suit examining the seated man's hand.

September 18, 2023July 9, 2024

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

By Linnéa J. Hussein, PhD

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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A scanned frame of film, with sprocket holes, shows a soldier in a helmet looking at an American flag.

March 27, 2023September 18, 2023

The Public Health Film Goes to War

By Michael Sappol, PhD

Public health and war have long been close companions. In the first terrible round of “modern wars”—the American Civil War, the Franco-Prussian War and World War I—military officials and civilian leaders called on health professionals and volunteers to help mobilize and protect military forces and civilian populations. Health experts in turn viewed these conflicts as a sort of laboratory to test and implement their theories, and an opportunity to use fresh knowledge and nascent technologies. They boarded the bandwagon to advance their professional, scientific, political, and ideological goals—and film was a medium with which to do so.

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A man in a plaid cap sets up a movie camera on a tripod in a meadow by a shelter of branches and canvas.

November 16, 2022March 27, 2023

The Films of Virologist Telford Work

By Dwight Swanson

The National Library of Medicine is home to 83 films created by virologist Telford H. Work documenting his life’s work and travels. The films supplement Work’s manuscript collection, which covers his education, career, hobbies, and achievements. Captured between 1942 and 1988, the films were primarily shot on 16mm film, with video copies made later.

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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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Title screen for An experimentally Produced Social Problem in Rats

September 20, 2021June 1, 2023

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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February 1, 2021February 2, 2023

Air Pollution Is a Human Problem: Mary Catterall’s Campaign for Clean Air in Leeds, England

By Angela Saward, BA, MTA, Wellcome Collection

Dr. Mary Catterall (1922-2015), doctor and sculptor, script and medical adviser to the film, It Takes Your Breath Away, became concerned with lung health when she was appointed Senior Registrar in Respiratory Medicine at Leeds General Infirmary, England in 1960. The film won a Silver Medal at the British Medical Association annual film competition in 1964.

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Brown smoke comes out of tall pipes from an industrial area behind a brick building in a grassy landscape.

September 8, 2020February 3, 2023

Darkening Day: Air Pollution Films and Environmental Awareness, 1960–1972

By Jennifer Lynn Peterson, PhD

The 1960s represent a turning point in popular awareness about environmental problems. The modern environmental movement that emerged in the mid-1960s and early ‘70s focused on a new set of concerns such as air pollution, water pollution, and pesticides. More federal environmental bills were signed in the 1960s and early 1970s than at any other period in U.S. history.

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A close up of a woman's face in a surgical mask.

March 31, 2020February 3, 2023

Screening the Nurse: Film, Fear, and Narrative from the 1940s to the 1970s

By David Cantor, PhD

In the early twentieth century, American nursing leaders came to see the motion picture as a quintessentially modern instrument of education, training, and recruitment. In their view, movies were a powerful tool to transform public opinion, to instruct new recruits in the mysteries of nursing practice, and to keep the qualified nurse abreast of new developments in the field.

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A film still of a framed poster that says "Know for Sure-get a blood test for syphilis."

November 20, 2019March 29, 2023

VD at the Movies: Public Health Service World War II Venereal Disease Films

By John Parascandola, PhD

The United States Public Health Service (PHS) released several education films in the 1930s and 1940s as part of a broader campaign against venereal-disease (VD). The agency had been operating a VD program since World War I, when concern over the number of Army recruits infected led Congress to enact a law that created a Venereal Disease Division in the PHS.

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