Main description:

Examines the impact and importance of the health education film in Europe and North America in the first half of the twentieth century.

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 publichealth film and other forms of motion picture.

CONTRIBUTORS: Christian Bonah, Tim Boon, David Cantor, Ursula von Keitz, Anja Laukoetter, Elizabeth Lebas, Vincent Lowy, Kirsten Ostherr, Miriam Posner, Alexandre Sumpf

Christian Bonah is a professor of the history of health and life sciences at the University of Strasbourg. David Cantor is a historian at the National Institutes of Health and the School of Public Health, University of Maryland, College Park. Anja Laukoetter is a historian at the Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin.

Contents:

Introduction
Between Movies, Markets, and Medicine: The Eastern Film Corporation, Frank A. Tichenor, and Medical and Health Films in the 1920s
In the Service of Industry and Human Health: The Bayer Corporation, Industrial Film, and Promotional Propaganda, 1934-42
Conversion Narratives, Health Films, and Hollywood Filmmakers of the 1930s and 1940s
Prostitutes, Charity Girls, and The End of the Road: Hostile Worlds of Sex and Commerce in an Early Sexual Hygiene Film
Film and Anti-alcohol Campaigns in the Soviet Union of the 1920s
"Where There's Life, There's Soap": Municipal Public Health Films and Municipal Cinema in Britain between the Wars
Cinema and Public Health Care in Early Postwar Germany, 1945-49
International Animation Aesthetics at the WHO: To Your Health (1956) and the Global Film Corpus
Measuring Knowledge and Emotions: Audience Research in Educational Films at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century
Truffle Hunters and Parachutists: In Search of the Audience for British Health Education Films, 1919-45
List of Contributors
Index