ABSTRACT
During COVID-19, acts of “heroism“—particularly by ordinary people “from below”—have been foregrounded, prompting complicated ethical issues in the public health context. In Chapter 4, the authors return once again to the large corpus of twentieth and twenty-first-century films depicting epidemics, and use a number of relevant examples to show how cinema has represented public health workers during these outbreaks. It is found that the public health worker in epidemic-related films tends to be an elite or authority figure with expertise, often male, whose personal burden and sacrifice goes unrecognized by others, or even directly challenged “from below” by the communities they serve or interact with. However, although the public health worker as “ordinary hero” rarely features, the “human” side of epidemiologists, physicians, and bacteriologists—through either personal redemption and a return to more humble roots, or recognition of personal error, questioning of official regulations and authorities, or eccentric and unorthodox behavior—makes these “elite” figures appear more ordinary, therefore bridging the gap between the two.
