ABSTRACT
In the twentieth century the experiences and expectations that patients brought to their encounters with the medical profession and medical institutions were profoundly shaped by their exposure to newspapers, magazines, novels, and, above all, cinema and television. In the waning years of the nineteenth century, a new medium that would come to dominate twentieth-century popular culture made its early, faltering debut. Health officials and reformers in the early twentieth century quickly seized the opportunity to adapt new forms of popular media, especially film, to sell medicine and public health to the public. Their faith in the technological expertise exemplified in the new sciences of bacteriology and immunology was mirrored by their faith in the ability of film to educate lay audiences and inspire them to change both their behavior and their attitudes. The Fildes painting depicted an older, white-haired physician hunched over the bedside of a sick child whose grief-stricken mother and bereft father await the doctor’s prognosis.
