Tag Archives: Medical Movies

Four nurses pose for smiling candid photos outdoors. October 06

Fresh Air and the White Plague

Circulating Now welcomes guest blogger Cynthia Connolly. Dr. Connolly is Associate Professor of Nursing at the Barbara Bates Center for the Study of the History of Nursing, University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing. She is a pediatric nurse and historian. She studies the history of children’s health and social welfare policy and practice in the […]

A large building with a long colonnaded porch in a tropical setting. July 06

Leprosy in India, ca. 1931

Circulating Now welcomes guest blogger Magnus Vollset. Dr. Vollset is a researcher at the University of Bergen, Norway, and holds a PhD in medical history from the same institution. Leprosy in India [Lepra in India in the original German] is a hard film to watch. In the course of its 12 minutes, it puts before […]

Grainy still from film that reads: Herr Professor Doktor Jakob Erdheim Prosektor Krankenhaus Der Stadt Wien March 15

Erdheim’s Autopsy: A Silent Film Fragment

Circulating Now welcomes guest bloggers Tatjana Buklijas, Birgit Nemec, and Katrin Pilz whose recent essay “Erdheim’s Autopsy: Dissection, motion pictures, and the politics of health in Red Vienna” on the NLM website Medical Movies on the Web discusses a fragment of silent film in the NLM historical collections: Herr Professor Doktor Jakob Erdheim, 1933, which […]

A scene from the beginning of the film shows a procession of people of different ages and sexes who suffer from rickets. January 08

The English Disease: The Health Education Film as Nazi Propaganda

By Michael Sappol Deformed unfortunates trudge back and forth, in a darkly-lit procession, over a map of Great Britain as the soundtrack sounds anxious notes of alarm. That extravagantly horrific scene introduces the Die englische Krankheit (The English Disease), a 13-minute black-and-white health education film, produced during wartime, under the supervision of Nazi authorities, by […]

X-ray of Masha and Dasha showing them joined together with legs on the top and bottom and heads opposite on the left and right. September 15

The Mysterious Case of Petr Anokhin, Soviet Scientific Cinema, and the Conjoined Twins

Circulating Now welcomes guest blogger Nikolai Krementsov. Dr. Krementsov is Professor at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology of the University of Toronto. He is the author of several books and numerous articles on the history of biomedical sciences in Russia and the Soviet Union. In 1957, the USSR Academy […]

Illustration of a Dissection of the Heart and Blood Vessels August 18

The Human Body in Pictures—Jacob Sarnoff

Circulating Now welcomes guest blogger Miriam Posner. Dr. Posner is the Digital Humanities program coordinator and a member of the core DH faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her Ph.D., from Yale University, is in Film Studies and American Studies. She is one of the confirmed participants in the upcoming April 2016 workshop […]

Private McGillicuddy's guts are literally 'tied in knots'. July 21

The Five Commandments

By Michael Rhode, with Michael Sappol Essay originally published in Hidden Treasure: The National Library of Medicine, 2011. Watch the films now on NLM’s Medical Movies on the Web. Inspired by the U.S. Army’s popular “Private Snafu” animated cartoon series, late in World War II the Navy hired Hugh Harman (1908–82) to do a similar […]