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In recent years, narratives of illness and medical practice have been subject to intensive scrutiny by scholars in the relatively new field of ‘Health Humanities’. Literary works have undoubtedly provided many highly complex accounts of the ways in which ill-health and medicine affect the lives of individuals, their families and communities. However, for much of the twentieth century, the cinema provided mass audiences with an equally powerful and more readily accessible source of images and ideas about doctors, illness and medical practice. Notwithstanding this, it has thus far attracted much less scholarly attention.
The study of medicine in film will involve close textual and contextual analysis of relevant movies, and be based on a good basic understanding of the language of film and relevant aspects of film theory, as well as the comparative study of narrative in medicine, literature and film. The emphasis will be on representations and narratives of ‘medicine in general’, but will also look at the systematic presentation of different aspects of medicine (eg. doctor-patient relationships; professional ambitions and rivalries, in particular the role of nurses in medical care; medicine in non-Western contexts; doctors as patients; the gender politics of health care and medicine; and the peculiar psychological and professional challenges and conflicts associated with the practice of psychiatry and psychotherapy. The module will also consider performative issues in the learning and practice of medicine as represented in films.