Health, Medicine, and the Media

Abstract

Health9Medicine, and theMedia ClaireHookerandHansPols Far more deeply than most of us realise, the media (in particular film, butalso television, magazines, newspapers, and,morerecently, the internet) has been related in many ways to the development of medicine and public health. For many of us, what we know about public health, medicine, and disease has come to us through the media. The medical profession and today's public health policies came into being in their modern forms during the second part of the nineteenth century, as medicine professionalised and as public health became defined, codified, and embodied in government bureaucracies as well as public and private institutions. These developments have coincided with, and relied upon, the growth of popular media, which became able to reach audiences of a variety of classes and backgrounds in unprecedented ways. Images of physicians, as well as images of health and disease, are disseminated through the modern media. While we know a great deal about the way images have functioned in the history of health and medicine, much remains to be explored with respect to the role of the media in those histories.1 In addition to providing diversion and entertainment,the media provides us with messages about health and disease (as television producers, and newspaper and magazine editors know, health content is followed by the public with great interest). Public health officials have often aimed to mimic the way the media entices the public by presenting health information in ways thatare entertaining.2The medical profession itself has only a limited influence on these representations. As a consequence, medical and media understandings of health and disease do not always coincide. This volume offers a smorgasbord exploration of the issues arising from the at times amicable and at othertimes ratherstrained relationship between medicine and the media over the past century in the only-just-postcolonial zone of Australia, New Zealand, and Indonesia. It carries us from the health education movies made for Indonesiansinthe 1930s andMaorisinthe 1950s tothesex education movies for the white Australianpublic catching up with the sexual revolution of the 1970s. Its authorsanalyse portrayalsof physicians Health & History, 2006. 8/2 1 2 CLAIRE HOOKER ANDHANSPOLS andmedical knowledge incontemporaryfilm andtelevision, suchas the depiction of a physician diagnosing homosexuality in Heavenly Creatures and a troubled female medical student in Charlene Does Med at Uni. As a result, the articles in this volume stimulate us to explore the relationship between health, medicine, and the media in great detail. If the relationship between medicine and the media has always been intimate, it has also at times been tense and antagonistic, especially because physicians and health officials have not always appreciated the way the media have portrayed health, disease, or theirprofessions. The media has generated a fairamountof cultural capital for the medical profession with its coverage of medical research, miracle cures, and the heroic portrayals of physicians. Yet, at the same time, the media has often encouraged andvalidated unhealthy behaviours, ranging from smoking, engaging in risky behaviour, drinking, and, at times, drugtaking.3Ironically, the very qualities that made the media so appealing to health promoters were, at the same time, the source of health problems: while promotors have made use of media-style substitutions of rational appeals with emotional ones to get messages about preventing tuberculosis across, those same emotional appeals have led people to smoke cigarettes, buy the last packets of Tamiflu, often on the basis of a single image or headline alone. Understanding the tensions and alliances between medicine and the media involves analysing the natureandorigins of themany slippery andunreliable representations thatcirculate in the media, how they emerged, and whose interests they serve. In addition, we need to analyse the nature of the social and cultural systems in which they arise and operate. Physiciansin themedia:Medicalheroesand, attimes,villains Among the most interesting examples of the portrayalof medicine in the media are medical movies and television dramas, which have existed since the 1930s. The remarkable Dr. Kildare, one of the first stars in a medical drama,graced American theatricalfilms in the 1930s and early 1940s, a radio series in the early 1950s, a television show of the 1960s, as well as a comic book series. He became a much admired physician...