Doctors in the Movies: Boil the Water and Just Say Aah (review)

Peter E. Dans. Doctors in the Movies: Boil the Water and Just Say Aah. Bloomington, Ill.: Medi-Ed Press, 2000. xxiv + 384 pp. Ill. $34.95 (0-936741-14-7).

Peter Dans explains that Doctors in the Movies "is not a history of medicine" (p. xiv), and that he is not "schooled in film" (p. xxiii). Instead, his book provides highly personal essay-style reviews of seventy-four feature films about physicians made from the 1930s through the 1990s. Dans, who teaches medicine and health policy at Johns Hopkins and who reviews current films for the medical honor society journal The Pharos, believes that modern physicians need to understand how their profession is represented to the public, and how such representations have changed over time. He evaluates these films for their accuracy, their artistry, and their support for his medical values, though he fully realizes that these criteria can conflict: "It would be nice if someone got it close to right. Then again, it would be a documentary," not "'art'" (p. 27).

Historians will find the book useful for several different purposes. It provides cinematic examples to support John C. Burnham's classic account of the rise and fall of public respect for medical science and its practitioners.¹ It offers help in choosing particular films for further research about and classroom illustration of many other aspects of twentieth-century health care. It also enables instructors to anticipate the reactions and questions that current physicians and medical students likely will have about classroom use of these films. Like the content of the reviews, the choice of topics and films is subjective. Dans includes topical chapters on medical schools, hospitals, research, heroes, villains, religion, women, and African Americans. There are no silent films, and almost no science fiction or psychiatry.

Doctors in the Movies can be compared with Michael Shortland's invaluable research guide, Medicine and Film, published by the Wellcome Unit at Oxford in 1989. Shortland presented brief plot summaries of more than four hundred films arranged chronologically, going back to the 1890s, while Dans offers more-extensive and more-evaluative assessments. Almost one-third of the films Dans discusses were made in the 1990s, providing a necessary update to Shortland's coverage. While Dans gives brief but well-informed background on the broad social and medical historical context, Shortland is more likely to offer some details on the responses of critics, censors, and the box office. For example, in discussing Sidney Poitier's searing portrait of a black physician in No Way Out (1950), Dans gives a rich nuanced reading of the film itself, but does not mention the vicious Red-baiting and censorship to which it was subjected--topics that constitute half of Shortland's entry. Medical historians will want to use both books for the decades on which they overlap.

Some readers may feel that Dans's characterization of Patch Adams (1998) as "preachy" and "self-indulgent" (p. 21) also applies to this book. However, Dans's judgments struck me as generally wise, humane, and informed. For example, his nuanced discussion of Arrowsmith (1931) shows how the film subtly heightened the book's criticism of medical hubris.

Doctors in the Movies includes a useful appendix listing the credits and availability of each film reviewed, and an idiosyncratic tabulation of about forty recurring themes and images, such as the two in the book's subtitle. However, there are no topical entries in the index--an omission that seriously limits the potential utility of this volume to researchers or teachers interested in finding films about a particular subject that is not listed in the chapter headings or the appendix of themes.

While it is not a comprehensive history, this book does provide much useful information, along with a sense of the engagingly enthusiastic interaction between the author and his subject.