Health, Medicine and the Media

Abstract

Far more deeply than most of us realize, the media (in particular film, but also television, magazines, newspapers, and, more recently, the internet) has been intrinsic to the history 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 public health policies, came into being in their modern forms during the second part of the nineteenth century, as medicine professionalized 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 that reached audiences of a variety of classes and backgrounds. Images of physicians, as well as images of health and disease, are disseminated through the modern media. In fact 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 the history of health and medicine. In addition to providing diversion and entertainment, the media provide us with messages about health and disease (as every newspaper and magazine editor knows, these stories are read 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 that are entertaining. The 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 some of the issues arising from the at times amicable and at other times rather strained 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 Indonesians in the 1930s and Maoris in the 1950s to the sex education movies for the white Australian public catching up with the sexual revolution of the 1970s. Its authors analyse portrayals of physicians and medical knowledge in contemporary film and television, such as 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 and medicine and the media in much greater detail.