Chapters and appropriate chapter suggestions are sought for:

"Signs of Life: Medicine and the Cinema"

"Signs of Life: Medicine and the Cinema" will consider how medicine,
the medical profession and medical science have been presented in
the cinema. The book will offer an historical, cultural and textual
study of the filmic representation of medicine and will appeal to both the
film studies and a wider film readership.

This book development project already includes a foreword by a major name in
medicine and the medical humanities and is receiving extremely enthusiastic
responses internationally. We intend for this to be an exceptional book.

The book is divided into three sections:

Section One: The Flicker of Life: Medicine Enters the Cinema
Section Two: Vital Signs: Medical Interventions and the Cinema
Section Three: Dying on film: medical cinema and the end of life

Indicative Chapter Areas (Section One) could include:

[1] Birth of cinema: birth in the cinema
[2] Ability and disability: depictions of "normalcy" throughout film
history
[3] Idealisation of youth and the body in the medical narratives of
the cinema
[4] Puberty and sexual awakening in classical and post-classical
cinema
[5] Gendered and sexualised medicine: the role of medicine in gender
and sexual definitions in film (eg: medicine and masculinity,
medicine and the feminine . . .)
[6] The role of film in advancement of medical science:
documentaries and dramas of medicine and the medical professions.

Indicative Chapter Areas (Section Two) could include:

[1] Disease and the cinema
[2] Film injuries: hurting and healing on film
[3] Discoveries: medical science and cinema
[4] Miracles, recuperations and cures
[5] Good health: general practitioners, hospitals and the role of
the patient in the cinema
[6] Film genre and medical intervention

Indicative chapter areas (Section Three) could include

[1] The medical rituals of dying: funerals, wakes and grieving
[2] Violence, killing and cinematic medicine
[3] Corpses and forensics: medicine meets the dead
[4] Spirit and the metaphysical: film, medicine and transcending the
body
[5] War films and the role of medic
[6] Film genre and the medical depiction of the dead and dying

Questions to be debated could include:

"How is the human form made to appear through medicine in film?"

"What contribution do cultural rituals make to filmic representation
of medicine?"

"How do gender, race and sexuality inform filmic constructions of
medical science and medical practitioners?"

"Where are the parameters of the scientific and the personal drawn
in 'film medicine'?"

"In whose interests are these 'signs of life' deployed?"

"What is the relation between history and the filmic depiction of
medicine?"

"How does cinema define the normality and the integrity of our
bodies medically?"

"How does cinema deal with being born, living, ageing and dying and
what role is played by medicine in this filmic narrative?"

Reply to: The General Editors, University of Wales:
"Medicine and Film project": filmmedicine_at_hotmail.com

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Received on Tue Jun 20 2000 - 17:29:04 EDT