Health Education Films in the Twentieth Century
About the book… During the twentieth century, film came to be seen as a revolutionary technology that could entertain, document, instruct, and transform a mass audience. In the fields of medicine and public health, doctors, educators, health advocates, and politicians were especially enthusiastic about the potential of the motion picture for communicating about health-related topics, including sexually transmitted diseases, cancer, tuberculosis, smoking, alcoholism, and contraception.
Focusing on the period from the 1910s to the 1960s, this book is the first collection to examine the history of the public health education film in Europe and North America. It explores how a variety of commercial, governmental, medical, and public health organizations in Europe and North America turned to movies to educate the public, reform their health behaviors, and manage their anxieties and hopes about health, illness, and medical and public health interventions. Moreover, by looking at categories of movies as well as individual examples, the book tackles questions of the representativeness of individual films and the relationship between the public health film and other forms of motion picture.
This companion website to the book provides access to a selection of films discussed in the chapters of the book. The companion website has been created by the research project MedFilm at the University of Strasbourg.
About the authors…
EDITORS: Christian Bonah is a professor of history and health and life sciences at the University of Strasbourg. David Cantor is a historian at the National Institutes of Health and the University of Maryland. Anja Laukötter is a researcher at the Center for the History of Emotions at Max-Planck-Institute for Human Development.
CONTRIBUTORS: Christian Bonah, Tim Boon, David Cantor, Ursula von Keitz, Anja Laukötter, Elizabeth Lebas, Vincent Lowy, Kirsten Ostherr, Miriam Posner, Alexandre Sumpf
Acknowledgement: MedFilm and University of Rochester Press gratefully acknowledge generous support from the Brocher Foundation, Switzerland.
