This theme issue of Gesnerus focuses on “Moving Images: Film in Medicine and Science – Medicine and Science in Film” and is edited by Iris Ritzmann, Hans-Konrad Schmutz and Eberhard Wolff. It proves in abundance that technical innovations, particularly concerning the technologies of mass communication, do not constitute an ordinary episode of the history of medicine and the sciences nor an external commodity, indeed useful for the public diffusion of the advances in the sciences, but deprived of a deep effect on its very development. They are maintaining a much more fundamental relationship with the objects to which they apply, i.e. medicine and the sciences. Film or moving images, far from being a simple technical aid, profoundly modify the social and cultural impact, the historical destiny, indeed, the very content and epistemology of sciences. The sciences, medicine included, in turn radically inflect the history of film, the medium of communication par excellence in the past century. The very ideology of progress, one of the first constituents of the dynamic of the sciences and medicine, takes shape in this play of reciprocal influences.
Gesnerus 66 (2009) No 1
Contents
Theme Issue «Moving Images: Film in Medicine and Science – Science and Medicine in Film»
Guest editors: Iris Ritzmann, Hans-Konrad Schmutz and Eberhard Wolff
Vincent Barras: Editorial Note (p. 5)
Iris Ritzmann, Hans-Konrad Schmutz und Eberhard Wolff: Film und Wissenschaft: Übergänge, Zusammenhänge und Parallelitäten. Eine Einführung [Film and Science: Transitions, Contexts and Parallelisms. An Introduction] (p. 7)
Jakob Tanner: Populäre Wissenschaft: Metamorphosen des Wissens im Medium des Films [Popular Science: Metamorphoses of Knowledge in Film] (p. 15)
Francesco Panese: Décrire et convaincre: rhétoriques visuelles de la cinématographie en médecine [Describe and Convince: Visual Rhetoric of Cinematography in Medicine] (p. 40)
Philipp Osten: Emotion, Medizin und Volksbelehrung: die Entstehung des «deutschen Kulturfilms» [Affect, Medicine and Public Enlightenment: the Origin of the Film Genre «Deutscher Kulturfilm»] (p. 67)
Mireille Berton: Cinéma et sciences du psychisme en 1900: la névrose, la paramnésie, la transe [Film and Sciences of the Mind in 1900: Neurosis, Paramnesia, Trance] (p. 103)
Essay Review Christian Bonah and Anja Laukötter: Moving Pictures and Medicine in the First Half of the 20th Century: Some Notes on International Historical Developments and the Potential of Medical Film Research (p. 121)
Theme Issue-Related Reviews (p. 147)
Book Reviews (p.165)
Book Notes (p. 197)
Books Received (p. 198)