Film als medizinhistorische Quelle

Although the availability of film sources has slightly improved over the last decade, a large quantity of those of interest to historians of medicine still lies undiscovered in German film archives. This article gives a brief overview of research done on German film since the 1990s when the moving pictures as a historical source finally attracted attention in the country of their origin. After some initial studies on the movie production of the Third Reich and its successful continuation in Western Germany into the 1950s, research interests soon shifted to films made for health education or as part of the scientific toolkit. Here, discussion has centered on the development and work of institutions that produced and distributed medical films, on how scientific filming invented its own narratives and on the mutual influence of the various genres of medical film. The author finally seeks to encourage historians of medicine not to confine themselves in their research by a lopsided concentration on film genres that have been issued by medical professionals but to take narratives on medicine, as told in entertainment films, seriously as well.