October 2007 Newsletter Vol. 36 No. 4
The Cartoon Medicine Show
At the 2007 HSS Annual Meeting in Washington, David Cantor and Michael Sappol will screen rare animated cartoons from the National Library of Medicine collection.
In a health education film for men released in 1952, a cartoon character called Ed Parmalee worries that he might have cancer. He worries so much that he screams at his wife, tries all sorts of dubious remedies, and avoids seeking expert help. The same reactions he has to worries about his automobile.
The movie – Man Alive, produced for the American Cancer Society – shows how fear impels Ed to ignore the warning signs of what might be cancer, just as it impels him to ignore the warning signs that his car engine needs attention. In the case of the car, Ed goes to a dodgy mechanic hoping to save money, but the mechanic ruins the engine, and it has to be junked. In the case of cancer, Ed eventually goes to his physician only to find that his worries were groundless. Thereafter, Ed and his wife go for a regular check-up, as much for the continued reassurance that they do not have the disease, as for the possibility that it might be detected.
Man Alive will be one of several movies presented at the HSS Annual Meeting. The Cartoon Medicine Show: Rare Animated Cartoons from the Collection of The National Library of Medicine will feature a rich sampling of rarely-screened medical cartoon animations from the 1920s to the 1960s, representing many medical themes and genres – dental hygiene, psychosomatic disease, physiology, mental health, malaria, tuberculosis, cancer, sanitary food preparation – some by well-known animators like Walt Disney, Friz Freleng, Zack Schwartz, Walter Lantz and Shamus Culhane, others entirely obscure.
Most of these movies present a comforting message about the capacity of medical science to detect and combat dread disease. But, it is often a message built upon fear. These films try to scare their audiences, but they also seek to manage fears, alternating between efforts to reassure people that personal watchfulness and expert medical help can prevent and cure deadly disease, and efforts to promote anxiety about the body and its vulnerability to sickness. “It is foolish to worry day and night about [disease],” the narrator in Man Alive informs Ed, “but it’s just as foolish not to worry about it at all. Be on guard. Don’t let fear make a mess of your life.”
The movies market such messages with inventive visual imagery, sometimes amusing, sometimes troubling. In the dental hygiene film, Winky the Watchman (1945), Good-uns (dentists) and Bad-uns (tooth decay) fight out World War II in your mouth. The Private McGillicuddy series (1940s) mobilizes racist caricatures to reinforce the links between the ‘war’ on disease and the war against Japan. The anti-cancer movie, The Traitor Within (1946), conjures up anxieties about industrial disruption with portrayals of the body as a series of factories and cancer as workers gone bad. And Man Alive and the anti-TB movie Rodney (1950) link medical effectiveness to post-war suburbanization, car culture, courtship, and marital relations.
These films are rich cultural resources. They provide marvelous insights into how movie-makers used animated cartoons to promote medical and scientific authority. But, they also provide insights into experts’ anxieties that lay audiences may confuse viewing with knowing. The point is made in the cancer movies which invite their viewers to watch their bodies for early signs of disease, but also warn them that only a doctor can interpret what these signs mean. This double message applies as much to the movies as to the signs they portray: “You must watch – but only your physician understands.”
– By David Cantor
History of Medicine Division,
National Library of Medicine
The Cartoon Medicine Show will be presented on 2 November 2007, 7.30 p.m. – 9.30 p.m.
Still from Man Alive (1952)
Courtesy: David Cantor