Date: Thu, 15 Jun 2000 12:12:08 +0100
From: "Michael WORBOYS(SCS)" <M.Worboys@shu.ac.uk>
(apologies for cross-posting)
Chapters and appropriate chapter suggestions are sought for an editied
volume entitled: "Signs of Life: Medicine and the Cinema"
"Signs of Life: Medicine and the Cinema" will consider how medicine,
the medical profession and medical science have been represented in
the cinema. The book will offer an historical, cultural and textual
study of the filmic representation of medicine and will appeal to both a
film studies readership and to medical historians, within whose field there
is an increasing interest in the perception of the medical profession in
audio-visual media, and in the popularisation of medicine in general, both
in documentaries and in fiction film.
This project already includes a foreword by a major name in medicine and
the medical humanities and is receiving enthusiastic responses
internationally.
The book is divided into three sections:
Section One: The Flicker of Life: Medicine Enters the Cinema
Section Two: Vital Signs: Medical Interventions and the Cinema
Section Three: Dying on film: medical cinema and the end of life
Indicative Chapter Areas (Section One) could include:
[1] Birth in the cinema
[2] Ability and disability: depictions of "normalcy" throughout film
history
[3] Idealisation of youth and the body in the medical narratives of
the cinema
[4] Puberty and sexual awakening in classical and post-classical
cinema
[5] Gendered and sexualised medicine: the role of medicine in gender
and sexual definitions in film (eg: medicine and masculinity,
medicine and the feminine . . .)
[6] The role of film in advancement of medical science:
documentaries and dramas of medicine and the medical professions.
Indicative Chapter Areas (Section Two) could include:
[1] Disease and the cinema
[2] Film injuries: hurting and healing on film
[3] Discoveries: medical science and cinema
[4] Miracles, recuperations and cures
[5] Good health: general practitioners, hospitals and the role of
the patient in the cinema
[6] Film genre and medical intervention
Indicative chapter areas (Section Three) could include
[1] The medical rituals of dying: funerals, wakes and grieving
[2] Violence, killing and cinematic medicine
[3] Corpses and forensics: medicine meets the dead
[4] Spirit and the metaphysical: film, medicine and transcending the
body
[5] War films and the role of medic
[6] Film genre and the medical depiction of the dead and dying
Questions to be debated could include:
"How is the human form made to appear through medicine in film?"
"What contribution do cultural rituals make to filmic representation
of medicine?"
"How do gender, race and sexuality inform filmic constructions of
medical science and medical practitioners?"
"Where are the parameters of the scientific and the personal drawn
in 'film medicine'?"
"In whose interests are these 'signs of life' deployed?"
"What is the relation between history and the filmic depiction of
medicine?"
"How does cinema define the normality and the integrity of our
bodies medically?"
How have specific diseases been constructed in the popular mind?
Do specific film genres (horror, farce, the western, the biopic, melodrama,
propaganda, instructional documentary) have their own ways of dealing with
sickness, medicine, medical institutions etc.?
Reply by email to: The General Editors, University of Wales, "Medicine and
Film project": filmmedicine@hotmail.com
Or to Andrew Moor: els604@bangor.ac.uk
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