Forget John Ford’s Arrowsmith (1931), Milos Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest (1975) and Preston Sturges’ The Great Moment (1944). While such films, to be sure, offer unique insights into the popular representation of modern medicine, scholars in recent years have unfettered themselves from Hollywood to examine medicine’s more dynamic audiovisual past. Whether as an instrumental aid to clinical observation, a pedagogical tool in medical education or as a means for disseminating public health messages, moving images, be they in 16 mm or MPEG-4 format, have for more than a century played an important and multifaceted role in shaping medical science and the perception of sickness and health.
Indispensable to this expanded historical purview are collections such as the Wellcome Library’s Moving Image and Sound Collection (MISC). Comprising roughly 4800 film and video objects and 1500 sound recordings, the MISC’s vast archival holdings cover everything from psychiatric documentation of shell shock during the First World War to the diverse public health films of the UK Central Information Office and Ministry of Health. Although confined to keyword searches through the Wellcome Library’s online catalogue, navigation of this vast collection is greatly improved by ample metadata supplying invaluable production details and time-saving synopses. Moreover, by registering for a free library account one is able to save searches and create exportable lists, greatly improving research efficiency and data management. Scholars unable to visit the collection in person will be pleased to learn that more than 600 of the MISC films have already been digitized and made available online for download at remarkably high resolution. For any academic who has had wifi fail during a conference presentation or apologized for the characteristic pixellation of a YouTube clip, this is no small matter! Moreover, all digitized moving images are conveniently registered under a Creative Commons license allowing for carefree non-commercial use provided proper attribution. However, unlike the copyright law eschewing YouTube, one feature the Wellcome Library’s online catalogue would benefit from is a public (albeit moderated) comment or annotation feature. Unlike textual sources, there is still relatively little scholarship on archival moving images, therefore it would be of tremendous value to enhance the MISC metadata through crowd-sourcing methods.
That said, the MISC does maintain a YouTube channel with 336 videos to its more than 600 accessible directly through the online catalogue (see https://www.youtube.com/user/WellcomeFilm). Although this does open up the collection to public comment, the uncensored nature of this forum proves of more sociological than historical value. For example, by the author’s calculation roughly six per cent of the videos on the Wellcome Film channel represent almost sixty-four per cent of the channel’s total views. The most popular being the birth of the first test tube baby Louise Brown followed by shell shock footage and a tonsillectomy from 1930. This peculiar distribution of views would undoubtedly make for interesting classroom discussion or contemporary comment, but for the historian of medicine it is of dubious value. Indeed many of the least popular videos on the Wellcome Film YouTube channel were seen by many millions more than the most popular videos in their respective historical contexts.
