Medicine and the media exist in a unique symbiosis. Increasingly, health-care consumers turn to media sources-from news reports to Web sites to tv shows-for information about diseases, treatments, pharmacology, and important health issues. And just as the media scour the medical terrain for news stories and plot lines, those in the health-care industry use the media to publicize legitimate stories and advance particular agendas. The essays in Cultural Sutures delineate this deeply collaborative process by scrutinizing a broad range of interconnections between medicine and the media in print journalism, advertisements, fiction films, television shows, documentaries, and computer technology.

In this volume, scholars of cinema studies, philosophy, English, sociology, health-care education, women's studies, bioethics, and other fields demonstrate how the world of medicine engages and permeates the media that surround us. Whether examining the press coverage of the Jack Kevorkian-euthanasia controversy; pondering questions about accessibility, accountability, and professionalism raised by such films as Awakenings, The Doctor, and Lorenzo's Oil; analyzing the depiction of doctors, patients, and medicine on E.R. and Chicago Hope; or considering the ways in which digital technologies have redefined the medical body, these essays are consistently illuminating and provocative.

Contributors. Arthur Caplan, Tod Chambers, Stephanie Clark-Brown, Marc R. Cohen, Kelly A. Cole, Lucy Fischer, Lester D. Friedman, Joy V. Fuqua, Sander L. Gilman, Norbert Goldfield, Joel Howell, Therese Jones, Timothy Lenoir, Gregory Makoul, Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, Faith McLellan, Jonathan M. Metzl, Christie Milliken, Martin F. Norden, Kirsten Ostherr, Limor Peer, Audrey Shafer, Joseph Turow, Greg VandeKieft, Otto F. Wahl

A collection of essays on medicine and media from newspapers through film, television, and computers

About the Author

Lester D. Friedman, Senior Lecturer, teaches film, medical humanities, and literature at Northwestern University. His books include The Jewish Image in American Film; Steven Spielberg: Interviews (coedited with Brent Notbohm); and the British Film Institute book Bonnie and Clyde.

Reviews
"This is a book so timely and valuable-even necessary-that the wonder is that it hasn't already appeared."-David B. Morris, author of Illness and Culture in the Postmodern Age and The Culture of Pain



Book Information
ISBN 9780822332947
Author Lester D. Friedman
Format Paperback
Page Count 472
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 676g