Tuesday, February 8, 2005
Origins of medical movies
At the end of the 19th century, Romanian neurologist Gheorghe Marinescu pioneered the use of cinematography in medicine. A recent paper in the journal Neurology lays out Marinescu's seminal studies and, most interestingly, the authors have made some very unusual video clips from his work available online.
Link to abstract; Link to films 1-4; Link to films 5-8 (via MetaFilter)"Between 1899 and 1902, Marinescu perfected the use of cinematography as a research method in neurosciences and published five articles based on cinematographic documents. He focused his studies particularly on organic gait disorders, locomotor ataxia, and hysteria. He adapted Charcot’s method of lining up several patients with the same disorder and showing them together to permit appreciation of archetypes and formes frustes ("early or mild cases" -ed.). He decomposed the moving pictures into sequential tracings for publication. He documented treatment results with cases filmed before and after therapy."
posted by David Pescovitz at 11:44:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments
