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This collection examines the representation of medicine and medical practices in period drama on television. It explores the fascination that the genre has with the history of illness and the medical profession, which is apparent in the huge number of shows which have medicine as either their narrative focus or as important subplots. Chapter topics are interdisciplinary in nature and range from the professionalisation of medicine in Poldark to the representation of mental illness in Peaky Blinders. This volume reflects on the ways popular culture has constructed and considered the frailty of the human body, the progress – or otherwise – of science, the intersection of medicine, race, class, and gender, and the provision of public healthcare. These dramas do not only reveal much about how we view our corporeal past, however. All these issues are still pertinent today, and frequently they also function as a commentary on, and often a critique of, the issues surrounding medicine in the present day – in particular debates around public health provision, the politics of reproduction, genetic testing and research, and global pandemics.
In an early episode of The Knick (2014–2015), Dr Algernon Edwards (André Holland), who has been forced to perform surgery in secret in the hospital basement after hours, records details of the process with photographs. Later, we see him, and eventually his colleagues, consult these images through a stereoscope. Edwards makes these photographs partly for patient case notes, and partly to track
in Paris, and finally her time teaching at a public school in Normandy. As in the other documentaries, video footage and photos from the past allow for contrasts and continuities between the present and the past. 20 The documentary does not, however, serve as a way for Bambi to go back in time and talk about her gender confirmation surgery as the centre of her life narrative. The second scene of the
stay for a few more days. Evoking memories of the idealized mother of Nate’s childhood, Ruth gets her way. Later in this first season, waiting at the hospital for the outcome of Nate’s surgery, Ruth, again with hair loose and tousled, is surrounded by her children and reminiscent of Michelangelo’s ‘Pieta’, the iconic sculpture of maternal suffering (‘The Last Time’, 1:13). This
driving collided with an army truck, and in the accident his lower body was crushed. He was to spend the next year undergoing reconstructive surgery. The event had a lasting effect on Elmer: every three months or so thereafter ‘he’d need to be catheterized to dilate his urinary passage, which was constricted by scar tissue’, and he remained addicted to the strong narcotic painkillers taken during his recovery for the rest of his life.4 This vivid image of recurrent scarring and the relief of narcotics all bound up with unspecified desire and the implication of deceit
few years ago’, spymaster Ackerman (James Robertson Justice, in his fourth Ealing role in as many years) gathers together in rooms within a tatty Jurassic-themed museum a motley group of would-be saboteurs for imminent war work. These include a French-Canadian priest Father Philip (Robert Beatty), Emil (John Slater) who requires plastic surgery so he won’t be recognised in his native Belgium, Max (Jack Warner), a chirpy cockney despite his multinational origins, Johnny (Gordon Jackson), a very youthful-looking Scots explosives expert, and Michèle (Simone Signoret
connection to his father and the racetrack. Even before this 120 David Milch point in the show, the vast majority of stories were about inter-family violence, alongside the usual street and drug-related killings. Events following this take on a regular pattern of tragedy and redemption: Russell becomes pregnant but loses her baby; Sipowicz discovers that he has prostate cancer but is given Viagra after his surgery which allows him to enjoy a second honeymoon with Sylvia; and in the final episode Simone and Russell decide to marry. Behind the scenes the show was
ageing and did not rule out cosmetic surgery as a solution to the problem of fewer and fewer film roles (Cole; So). However, more recently she has had a change of heart, citing the fact that the older actresses she admires have not had surgery (Verley and Defouilloy 153). In 2017 Gainsbourg addressed the way magazine images of female stars, including herself, are airbrushed and retouched to hide visible signs of ageing: ‘It’s like, ‘Give me back my age! I do have wrinkles! I don’t look like a 20-year-old’ (qtd. in Feinstein). However, Gainsbourg does admit that youth
to do it? I want to do what I want to do rather than what’s good for my career. 10 Notes 1 Andrew Eaton, interview (May 2006). 2 Pamela McClintock, ‘Paramount Tries “Heart” Surgery’, Variety (21 May 2007), www
unacceptable to the world. Eugen Shuftan’s photography of Franju’s imagery of faces, masks and facelessness haunts more powerfully than any drama of looks, perhaps simply because of the subliminal hold that facial form has on spectatorial perception. The film’s central scene of surgery – the operation on Edna Grüberg – is its most graphic illustration of the paradoxical significance of the face: the spectator is taken right through it in a