MDs in the Movies

Moviemakers have always been fascinated by physicians. Just like movies that focus on cowboys, lawyers, detectives, and romance, movies about physicians offer the writer the benefit of a definitive ending. When the final scene in a movie shows a mother with her newborn child, it's as conclusive as Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday blasting the Clanton family, or the jury foreman saying, "We find the defendant guilty as charged." Medical movies can focus on life and death, without the need to consider unpleasantness or inconclusiveness, like discharge to a long-term care facility or disability hearings.

Although some concepts seem to continue, screen treatment of physicians has changed over the years. On one side there is an admiration for the medical profession, represented by presentations of dedicated and selfless healers, but this is balanced by fear, if not of individual physicians, then at least of the possibilities that can result from untried science.

Possibly the first medical movie ever made was a 1909 D.W. Griffith one-reel (10-minute) film The Country Doctor. The film, which was revolutionary in its techniques, tells the story of a physician forced to choose between caring for one of his patients, and his own daughter. In contrast, Where Are My Children?, a 1916 film starring Tyrone Power Sr., portrayed a physician, albeit an abortionist, as a leering, sneering embodiment of evil. (Mr. Power, the star of the movie, and symbol of all that was good and decent, played a lawyer. Times have changed.)

God & Demigod

During the 1930s and into the 1940s, doctors in movies followed one of two paths – playing god or demigod. Under the heading of "playing god" came the horror movies, in which physicians routinely experimented with concoctions made of bat serum or gorilla plasma. The archetypical mad physician was played by Lionel Atwill, a successful, classically trained British actor who had co-starred with Helen Hayes and Lilly Langtry.

In The Strange Case of Doctor Rx, Atwill attempts to transplant the brain of the hero into the body of a gorilla. Atwill was quoted as saying, "One side of my face is gentle and kind, incapable of anything but love of my fellow man. The other side, the other profile, is cruel and predatory and evil, incapable of anything but the lusts and dark passions. It all depends on which side of my face is turned toward you – or the camera. It all depends on which side faces the moon at the ebb of the tide." It was the perfect description of the role – the caring physician who turned out to be a madman in the final reel.

Dedicated Docs

But if escapist movies seemed to warn that every hypodermic needle might be curare-tipped, mainstream movies portrayed physicians as dedicated healers. The 1934 production of Men In White, based on the Pulitzer Prize winning play, featured Clark Gable as a surgeon whose fiancée can't understand why he places his work ahead of attending her cocktail parties. The stage direction for the play includes a description of one physician: "He carries himself with quiet, simple dignity. There is strength in the set of his jaw; but the predominating quality expressed in his face is a sweet and simple goodness." (These days, anything this sappy either has one slipping into a diabetic coma or looking for a shovel.)

The high point of the dedicated physician movies was the Dr. Kildare series, based on the novels of Frederick Faust, who wrote under the pen name Max Brand (and is best known for his western novels). Lew Ayers played the young and idealistic physician – at least he did until he requested conscientious objector status during World War II, and was dropped from the series. Although Ayers served as a medic under fire in the Pacific, his acting career never fully recovered. The series continued until 1947, with Lionel Barrymore's crusty Dr. Leonard Gillespie as the central focus, and various actors, including Van Johnson, portraying the idealistic young MD. It may be of some significance that Dr. Kildare's rival at the hospital was played, with dignity, by the Chinese actor Keye Luke, even though minority actors were rarely offered substantial roles. (Mr. Luke is probably best known for playing Charlie Chan's bumbling #1 son while Caucasian actors Warner Oland and Roland Winters got the title role.)

This period also saw the actor Jean Hersholt playing the beloved and dedicated Dr. Christian in the Dr. Christian series (1939-1941). While the movie series only lasted for six films, Hersholt portrayed the character in a radio series that lasted for 17 years. Meet Dr. Christian has a typical story line – Dr. Christian wants to build a hospital, the mayor wants a highway. Then the mayor's daughter needs surgery and the politico sees the light. Hersholt was quoted as saying, "Dr. Christian is such a sweet sentimental fellow, I'd hate to be stuck with playing him for the rest of my life."

Changes, and "The More Things Change …"?

It couldn't last. James Kildare was to the practice of medicine what Roy Rogers was to cattle ranching, and the days of the white hat were past. In 1954, James Moser created the television show Medic, which featured Richard Boone as Dr. Konrad Styner. This was the giveaway. There is nothing warm and fuzzy about Konrad with a K. The show was filmed in actual Los Angeles hospitals, and the Los Angeles Country Medical Association (LACMA) had the right of script approval. Although LACMA looked for favorable portrayal of physicians, the show was relatively realistic in its portrayal of both medical practice and procedures. Pitted against I Love Lucy, Medic only lasted two seasons, but it had a profound effect on medical dramas. Moser went on to produce the TV series Ben Casey about a neurosurgeon who was mad at everybody, while Richard Boone starred in Have Gun, Will Travel as a black-hatted western antihero.

After a brief flurry of realism, the pendulum continued to swing. Perhaps the 1950s were a period of general disillusionment. In 1956, José Ferrer made the movie The Great Man and a year later, Elia Kazan directed A Face in the Crowd. Neither movie dealt with physicians, but both focused on debunking popular figures. At the same time, physicians lost their primacy in horror movies. The US successfully exploded an H-bomb in late 1952; the Soviets followed a few months later. Godzilla, a 1954 Japanese monster movie that traced its roots to atomic bomb testing in the Pacific, dwarfed experiments with gorilla brains or bat blood.

Dr. Glen Flores, an associate professor of pediatrics at the Medical College of Wisconsin, and director of the Center for the Advancement of Underserved Children at the college, has done an extensive study of the portrayal of physicians in movies since 1960. Writing in the December 2004 Archives of Disease in Childhood he notes:

1. Compassion and idealism were common in early doctor movie portrayals but have become increasingly scarce in recent decades;
2. Since the 1960s, positive doctor portrayals have declined while negative portrayals have increased;
3. Doctors frequently are depicted as greedy, egotistical, uncaring, and unethical, especially in recent films;
4. A recurrent theme is the "mad scientist" – the doctor-researcher who values research more than patients' welfare;
5. Because negative portrayals of doctors are on the rise, patients' expectations and the doctor-patient relationship may be adversely affected;
6. Films about doctors can serve as useful gauges of public opinion and tools for medical education.

When physicians look at movies, they ask for accuracy and (although it may seem contradictory) favorable portrayal of the profession. But what happens when physicians make the movies themselves? When Michael Crichton, MD (Harvard Med 1969) collaborated with Robin Cook, MD (Columbia Med 1966), the result was the 1978 release Coma. According to one plot summary:

A young woman doctor discovers something sinister going on in her hospital. Relatively healthy patients are having 'complications' during simple operations and ending up in comas. The patients are then shipped off to an institute that looks after them. The young doctor suspects there is more to this than meets the eye.

After that, nobody can complain about the 1998 film The Patriot when Steven Seagal, as R. Wesley McLaren, PhD, MD, examines a virus with a light microscope and finds a cure for the viral disease overnight – and kills the head of a paramilitary unit with the stem of a wineglass. At least it shows physicians in a positive light.

Discuss This Article

Have something you'd like to say? Tell us what you think! Read and post comments for this article.

Find a Job

Choose your career:

MedHunters is the world's biggest healthcare job board. Our job directory has 17,260 jobs with 2,476 hospitals and other direct employers.

We want you to find your next job on MedHunters. Need Help? Call us at 1-888-884-8242, email us at info@medhunters.com or sign up now.