Medicine’s Moving Pictures: Medicine, Health, and Bodies in American Film and Television (review)

This book of essays makes a significant contribution to the study of medicine, health, and bodies in American film and television. As the editors explain in their preface to the book, since the early twentieth century “Americans have learned about health, disease, and doctors by going to the movies” and by watching television shows, instructional films, newsreels, cartoons, and health-related videos and DVDs (p. 1). Medicine is associated with cultures of viewing—with diverse audiences gathering to watch health-related moving pictures in a wide variety of different places, including homes, schools, movie theaters, churches, factories, offices, and even buses. The importance of moving pictures for understanding the complexities of health and disease in the United States and the media’s power to shape health perceptions, practices, and policies deserves more attention for, as the editors explain, medicine has long provided media with content and expertise while media has provided medicine with modern communications for delivering health- and disease-related messages.

This study thus represents a contribution to a wider effort by scholars to bring critical attention to the long history of medicine’s moving pictures and their complex relationship to American medicine and modern mass media. The authors define medicine’s moving pictures as a distinct genre, one whose outlines may be identified through its topics and by its unique historical relationship to the medical profession and science. The editors’ introduction offers an insightful and informed overview of the topic and of relevant findings, themes, research challenges, and opportunities for future research. As they explain, medicine’s moving pictures move in a variety of ways: through their physical distribution to different viewing sites, their constant movement across different media, their capacity to move audiences to tears, laughter, fear or sympathy; and as catalysts that motivate audiences to take actions regarding new health-related practices or health controversies. The essays are by some of the top scholars on this topic and are on the whole very compelling, well written, and engaging. A particular strength of the book is its juxtaposition of essays that integrate into their analysis a range of different theoretical tools and frameworks, including feminist film theories and theories of cultural reception as well as, in a few examples, critical race theories. Essays by Martin S. Pernick and Nancy Tomes explore the changing relationships among public health, popular disease narratives, and Hollywood films in the twentieth century in order to identify specific characteristics of the health films as an emerging genre. John Parascandola, Paula A. Treichler, Lisa Cartwright, and Leslie J. Reagan examine the blurring of education and entertainment in mass media representations of specific diseases and disabilities, including syphilis, HIV/AIDS, deafness, and breast cancer. Essays by Naomi Rogers, Vanessa Gamble, Joseph Turow and Rachel Gans-Boriskin, Susan E. Lederer, and Valerie Hartouni consider the dedicated effort of producers, writers, and people on film to produce accurate images and information in medical movies and television shows, from Sister Kenny (1946) to No Way Out (1950) to M*A*S*H. They show that moving pictures have been, and remain, an integral part of the history of national discussions and debates about disease conditions, patient experiences, medical perspectives, racial, class and gender dynamics, and bodies and disabilities.

This book will undoubtedly leave readers wanting to learn more about images and moving pictures in health and medicine. The editors have done an excellent service by providing several tools for further study, including a detailed bibliography, suggestions for further reading, an index that helps cross-reference topics discussed in the various essays, and information about collections and archives of medicine’s forgotten moving pictures. This is a lively and important collaborative achievement that will be of interest to scholars in a wide range of...