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Reviewed by:
  • The Picture of Health: Medical Ethics and the Movies
  • Susan E. Lederer
Henri Colt, Silvia Quadrelli, and Lester Friedman, eds. The Picture of Health: Medical Ethics and the Movies. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. xxx + 527 pp. Ill. $39.95 (978-0-19-973536-5).

“Pictures are for entertainment,” American film producer Samuel Goldwyn famously observed, “messages should be delivered by Western Union.” The producer [End Page 146] of such memorable Hollywood films as Wuthering Heights (1939), The Little Foxes (1941), and The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), Goldwyn also produced such classic (history of medicine) films as Arrowsmith (1931) and the 1922 film A Blind Bargain (about gland grafting experiments and a “mad” surgeon). The editors of this new collection of essays—University of California at Irvine pulmonologist Henri Colt, Argentine oncologist Silvia Quadrelli, and media scholar Lester Friedman—claim that pictures are for teaching bioethics. If you have not used films in teaching medical ethics, the editors insist, reading this collection will alter your educational practices. Their collection of more than eighty essays represents “cinemeducation,” the use of films to promote discussion, reflection, and skill acquisition in the human dimensions of clinical practice and here, bioethics and moral dilemmas of health care and health services.

For this collection and given the multiple topics, perspectives, and issues, the editors assembled “an eclectic group of internationally recognized scholars and practitioners from diverse disciplines including medical ethics, clinical medicine, philosophy, psychology, media and communication studies, medical humanities, public health, business, theology, law, cultural studies, political science, women’s studies, English, psychology, and health care education” (p. viii). Careful readers will note two things about this list: psychology appears twice and history and/or history of medicine appears not at all. The double mention of psychology may be a simple oversight, but what to make of the near total absence of historians? What does this volume offer historians of medicine?

This book, divided into three parts, is explicitly intended as a teaching resource. Part I features four essays about personal reflections about film and medical ethics. Looking backward to 1972, Albert Jonsen, one of the founding members of the discipline of bioethics, focuses on his use of the 1931 Universal film Frankenstein to teach bioethics in San Francisco. “Bioethics,” Jonsen remarks, “began at the movies” (p. 4). Peter Dans, longtime author of the “Physician at the Movies” column for The Pharos, the journal of the medical student honor society Alpha Omega Alpha, contributes a thoughtful essay about using film to teach medical students at the University of Colorado in the 1970s in “the dark days before video recorders” (p. 12). Johanna Shapiro (director of the Program in Medical Humanities and Arts at UC Irvine) and Stephen Crawford and Henri Colt also provide essays about their experiences using film to teach medical students, residents, and their medical colleagues.

Part II of the volume, the longest section, contains eighty essays. These essays are divided into eight sections reflecting major themes in bioethics: autonomy, justice, and informed consent; professionalism, communication, and health provider–patient relationships; health policy; research ethics; reproduction, genetics, and sexuality; death and dying; and other ethical issues in medical specialties. Each essay is organized around scenes from an individual film or films and selected because it is illustrative of ethical dilemmas and evocative for discussions of bioethical issues. These films are, for the most part, mainstream American films released after 1980, which makes them more readily accessible for rental and purchase for classroom use. The adaptation of most of these films for use in teaching [End Page 147] bioethics will be fairly obvious: research and racism, Miss Evers’ Boys (1997); genetic engineering, Gattaca (1997); euthanasia, The English Patient (1996); and organ trafficking, Dirty Pretty Things (2002).

There are some notable exceptions and more idiosyncratic choices. Therese Jones, director of the Arts and Humanities in Healthcare Program at the University of Colorado, provides a fascinating glimpse into issues of patient privacy and voyeurism using the black-and-white documentary film Titicut Follies (1967). Karma Lekshe Tsomo, professor of theology at the University of San Diego, discusses using a scene from filmmaker Akira Kurasawa’s Red Beard (1965) to highlight...

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