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  • Medicine’s Moving Pictures: Medicine, Health, and Bodies in American Film and Television
  • Julie K. Brown (bio)
Medicine’s Moving Pictures: Medicine, Health, and Bodies in American Film and Television. Edited by Leslie J. Reagan, Nancy Tomes, and Paula A. Treichler. Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2007. Pp. ix+343. $85.

Recent screenings of educational health films from the rich collection of the National Library of Medicine at professional conferences have prepared an eager audience for this book. Medicine’s Moving Pictures brings together current research on these and other modern media forms representing issues of health and medicine. Eleven collected essays cover a broad and diverse range of film genres (educational, promotional, commercial) but also popular television productions. Given the wide historical scope of the essays (most of the twentieth century), the editors have wisely adopted a [End Page 474] loose overlapping framework of three sections—on the emerging genre of medical/health films, on the blurred boundaries of education and entertainment, and on the representation of the nature and authority of medicine and health.

Section 1 begins with Martin Pernick’s essay that deftly shows how five health films made between 1914 and 1927 laid out the basic issues by shaping perceptions of who and what was responsible for disease, promoting medicine’s social authority, creating a distinctive aesthetic for health, and establishing what health topics were fit for viewing. Nancy Tomes’s following chapter examines the distinctive interplay between formats in news media and feature films between the 1920s and 1940s for the disease representation of celebrity patients Christy Mathewson, Franklin Roosevelt, Lou Gehrig, and George Gershwin.

John Parascandola opens section 2 with a chapter on U.S. Public Health Service venereal-disease films during World War II. This richly documents a complex history of filmmaking where commercial productions, public health issues, and social censorship eventually clashed over conflicts of cultural values and attitudes. Paula Treichler shifts direction with a chapter on the narrative power of the television soap-opera series General Hospital to show how information on HIV/AIDS was communicated to a mass audience in the mid-1990s. Lisa Cartwright uses the lens of contemporary feminist film theory and psychoanalytic literary analysis to read the British fictional melodrama Mandy (1952) depicting a deaf girl who acquires oral speech. Leslie Reagan’s comparison of two breast-cancer films (1949 (1950) made by the American Cancer Society—one intended for clinical medical professionals and the other for women’s self-examination—vividly illustrates the attitudes to medical authority, female passivity, and contradictory messages embedded in these widely distributed productions.

Section 3 begins with Naomi Rogers’s chapter on the making of the Hollywood movie Sister Kenny (1946), depicting her pioneering polio treatment work in Australia—a rich and complex discussion of philanthropic politics, medical posturing, and cinematic maneuverings. Vanessa Gamble’s discussion of the contrasting portrayals of black physicians in Lost Boundaries (1949), about real-life Dr. Albert Johnston “passing” as a white doctor, and No Way Out (1950), a fictional account of virulent attacks on a black intern following the death of a white patient, offers important insights into the ways that commercial Hollywood productions accommodate and sometimes challenge conventional representation. Joseph Turow and Rachel Gans-Boriskin write on the evolving image of television doctors from the highly controlled representations in the 1950s and formula-making blend of realism and melodrama in the 1960s to the current unfettered view exposing their vulnerability in controlling the larger issues surrounding patients’ health. Susan Lederer deals with the representation of medical research in popular Hollywood films of the 1930s and 1940s, especially in [End Page 475] regard to the use of laboratory animals and human experimentation and the ensuing efforts by the medical community to constrain such depictions. The final chapter by Valerie Hartouni uses the science-fiction film Gattaca (1997), which posits a future “valid” genetically edited population against the “invalids” (persons with random genetic selection), to lay out some of the current issues defining biological as well as legal “personhood.”

Such a rich assemblage of exceptional essays is testimony to the critical interaction of culture with the representation of medicine and health on...

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