Medicine and Film Credits: 5

Catalog description

Movies are narratives that record, instruct, motivate, entertain and transform. This course investigates the ways in which physicians, patients, and medical students have been portrayed in Hollywood films over the course of the twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries. Compassion, idealism, and heroism were common traits in early doctor movies but there was also a recurrent theme of the greedy callous doctor who valued research over patient welfare, and profits over ethics. We discuss how films reflected, changed, and molded perceptions of physicians and patients in the past, and examine what contemporary portrayals of the medical profession can tell us about the expectations and fears of patients today.