Peter E Dans
Medi-Ed Press, £23.08, pp 408 
ISBN 0 936741 14 7
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Rating: ★★★★
If you're honest, can you say you've never wanted to be Harrison Ford, Sean Connery, or Michael Douglas (older readers can substitute Clark Gable or Errol Flynn)? Or how about one of the Grants, Hugh and Cary? Because they've all wanted to be you, at least transitorily; cinema icons to a man [women readers, your day will come], they've acted as medics in movies. It indicates the commercial mileage in medicine that the film industry has long recognised and the star power that has fuelled popular myth making about doctors over the years.
Peter Dans is an internist at Johns Hopkins University with a longstanding passion for movies, especially doctor movies. He's written a regular column about them for a US medical journal, and his book begins the sizeable task of considering the whys and wherefores of this underexplored genre.
Dans picks out themes such as “Hollywood Goes to Medical School” and “The Kindly Saviour” and looks at selected films as case studies, prefacing each chapter with observations about the topic in question. He makes trenchant points about the portrayal of female and black doctors—note their absence from the opening list—in chapters that inevitably raise as many questions as they answer. The book is laced with a worldliness that prevents it from drifting into self reference—in one nicely turned sentence Dans observes that “A generation that hardly knew serious illness came to see good health as a right rather than a fragile blessing.”
Dans confines his considerations to storylines, explicitly renouncing any aspirations to film studies-style academia. While this policy will probably suit most readers, it may leave others hankering for a little more cinematographic commentary. The book works within its own terms, however, because Dans's lively prose brings the films to life.
Are any of them actually good? Well, “good” is, of course, a problematic adjective; though it is true that a discerning audience with no special interest might be unimpressed with most of them, Dans shows that there are many honourable exceptions.
The book itself is a delightful companion, a kind of bespoke Halliwell's Film Guide for anyone with even a slight curiosity about doctors on the big screen. And for those with a formal interest in the burgeoning field of medical humanities, it will be an invaluable resource—for example, when investigating professional identity. It certainly passes the surest test of any cinema book—it makes you want to see more films.