Cultural Sutures

Cultural Sutures

Medicine and Media

  • Author: Friedman, Lester D.; Metzl, Jonathan Michel; Caplan, Arthur L.; Turow, Joseph; Wahl, Otto F.
  • Publisher: Duke University Press
  • ISBN: 9780822332565
  • eISBN Pdf: 9780822385530
  • Place of publication:  Durham , United States
  • Year of digital publication: 2004
  • Month: May
  • Pages: 467
  • DDC: 306.4/61
  • Language: English
Medicine and the media exist in a unique symbiosis. Increasingly, health-care consumers turn to media sources—from news reports to Web sites to tv shows—for information about diseases, treatments, pharmacology, and important health issues. And just as the media scour the medical terrain for news stories and plot lines, those in the health-care industry use the media to publicize legitimate stories and advance particular agendas. The essays in Cultural Sutures delineate this deeply collaborative process by scrutinizing a broad range of interconnections between medicine and the media in print journalism, advertisements, fiction films, television shows, documentaries, and computer technology.

In this volume, scholars of cinema studies, philosophy, English, sociology, health-care education, women’s studies, bioethics, and other fields demonstrate how the world of medicine engages and permeates the media that surround us. Whether examining the press coverage of the Jack Kevorkian–euthanasia controversy; pondering questions about accessibility, accountability, and professionalism raised by such films as Awakenings, The Doctor, and Lorenzo’s Oil; analyzing the depiction of doctors, patients, and medicine on E.R. and Chicago Hope; or considering the ways in which digital technologies have redefined the medical body, these essays are consistently illuminating and provocative.

Contributors. Arthur Caplan, Tod Chambers, Stephanie Clark-Brown, Marc R. Cohen, Kelly A. Cole, Lucy Fischer, Lester D. Friedman, Joy V. Fuqua, Sander L. Gilman, Norbert Goldfield, Joel Howell, Therese Jones, Timothy Lenoir, Gregory Makoul, Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, Faith McLellan, Jonathan M. Metzl, Christie Milliken, Martin F. Norden, Kirsten Ostherr, Limor Peer, Audrey Shafer, Joseph Turow, Greg VandeKieft, Otto F. Wahl

  • Contents
  • Acknowledgments
  • Introduction: Through the Looking Glass: Medical Culture and the Media - Lester D. Friedman
  • 1. Print Media
    • The Pharmaceutical Gaze: Psychiatry, Scopophilia, and Psychotropic Medication Advertising, 1964–1985 - Jonathan M. Metzl
    • Taken to Extremes: Newspapers and Kevorkian’s Televised Euthanasia Incident - Arthur L. Caplan and Joseph Turow
    • Stop the Presses: Journalistic Treatment of Mental Illness - Otto F. Wahl
  • 2. Advertisements
    • The Nurse-Saver and the TV Hostess: Advertising Hospital Television, 1950–1970 - Joy V. Fuqua
    • Exorcising ‘‘Men in White’’ on Television: An Exercise in Cultural Power - Kelly A. Cole
    • Drive-By Medicine: Managed Care Ads on Billboards - Norbert Goldfield
  • 3. Fiction Films
    • Frankenflicks: Medical Monsters in Classic Horror Films - Stephanie Brown Clark
    • Big Boys Do Cry: Empathy in The Doctor - Lucy Fischer
    • Institutional Impediments: Medical Bureaucracies in the Movies - Marilyn Chandler McEntyre
  • 4. Television
    • Images and Healers: A Visual History of Scientific Medicine - Marc R. Cohen and Audrey Shafer
    • From City Hospital to ER: The Evolution of the Television Physician - Gregg VandeKieft
    • The Fat Detective: Obesity and Disability - Sander L. Gilman
    • Dissecting the Doctor Shows: A Content Analysis of ER and Chicago Hope - Gregory Makoul and Limor Peer
  • 5. Documentaries
    • Reproductive Freedom, Revisionist History, Restricted Cinema: The Strange Case of Margaret Sanger and Birth Control - Martin F. Norden
    • Continence of the Continent: The Ideology of Disease and Hygiene in World War II Training Films - Christie Milliken
    • ‘‘Invisible Invaders’’: The Global Body in Public Health Films - Kirsten Ostherr
    • The Medium Is the Message: Documenting the Story of Dax Cowart - Therese Jones
  • 6. Computers
    • Technologies Transforming Health Care: X Rays, Computers, and the Internet - Joel D. Howell
    • The Shape of Things to Come: Surgery in the Age of Medialization - Timothy Lenoir
    • Medicine.com: The Internet and the Patient-Physician Relationship - Faith McLellan
    • Virtual Disability: On the Internet, Nobody Knows You’re Not a Sick Puppy - Tod Chambers
  • Works Cited
  • Contributors
  • Index

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