50:169 Doctors in Film

Reading assignments

Some of the assigned readings for this course are restricted to students who have registered for the course and have received the password for accessing those provided in .pdf format.

• Burnham, John, "American Medicine's Golden Age: What Happened to It?" (1982)
• Fisher, Lucy, "Big Boys Do Cry: Empathy in The Doctor." (2004)
• Pressman, Jack, Last Resort: Psychosurgery and the Limits of Medicine (1998), epilogue

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The reading below is available through the University of Iowa Library subscriptions to on-line full text services, and requires a HawkID and password to use. To find the on-line versions of journals, go to the University of Iowa Library's online catalog, via InfoHawk, and type the name of the journal into the quick search of the "title" field. Under the listing for the journal, links to on-line full text versions are available. Check to see which includes the year and volume for the specific article you are seeking and follow the links to find it. There are other ways to access articles (via full-text indexes, etc) so use the one you find easiest.

• Susan Lederer, "Repellent Subjects: Hollywood Censorship and Surgical Images in the 1930s," Literature and Medicine 17 (1998), 91-113. [Project Muse]

Recommended readings:

On doctors in film and other visual media:

Peter E. Dans, Doctors in the Movies: Boil the Water and Just Say Aah (Med-Ed Press, 2000). Dans, an internist, provides his own take on films in which physicians and medicine play central roles. [On reserve in Hardin Library]

Lester D. Friedman, ed. Cultural Sutures: Medicine and the Media (Duke University Press, 2004) . [On reserve at Hardin Library] This is a collection of essays by scholars from a variety of academic disciplines on the intersections between medicine and the media. See especially:

• Stephanie Brown Clark, "Frankenflicks: Medical Monsters in Horror Films."
• Lucy Fisher, "Big Boys Do Cry: Empathy in The Doctor."
• Marilyn Chandler Mcentyre, "Instutitional Impediments: Medical Bureaucracies in the Movies."
• Gregg Vanekeift, "From City Hospital to ER: The Evolution of the Television Physician."

Further reading on the films, books behind the films, and relevant topics for viewing them.

• Chambers, Tod. The Fiction of Bioethics [Cases as Literary Texts] (Routledge, 1999)
• Hyatt, Marchall and Sanders, Cheryl, "Film as a Medium to Study the Twentieth Century Afro-American Experience," Journal of Negro Education 53 (1984).
• Mullan, Fitzhugh.White Coat, Clenched Fist: The Political Education of an American Physician (New York: Macmillan, 1976).
• Rosenberg, Charles “Martin Arrowsmith: The Scientist as Hero,” in No Other Gods: On Science and American Social Thought (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 123-131, notes 278-281.
• Summers, William C. "On the Origins of the Science in Arrowsmith: Paul de Kruif, Felix d'Herelle and Phage," Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 46 (1991): 315-332.
• Vaughn, Stephen, "Ronald Reagan and the Struggle for Black Dignity in Cinema, 1937-1953," Journal of Negro History 77 (1992), 1-16.