Projecting health

In the annals of UK public health information films, the AIDS Monolith (1987) is perhaps the most infamous—and melodramatic. The 40 second film, shown recently at the National Film Theatre as part of a season to mark the 60th anniversary of the COI, launched the government's major campaign with the slogan “AIDS: Don't Die of Ignorance.”

“There is now a danger that has become a threat to all of us,” intones the film's ominous opening; and it ends with a warning, reminiscent of an Old Testament prophesy, against the dangers of disregarding the leaflet about AIDS which was delivered to every UK household. The film's sexual frankness “The virus can be passed during sexual intercourse with an infected person. Anyone can get it, man or woman”, crude production values and its stark image of a mountain crumbling to reveal the words AIDS etched on a huge monolith was unprecedented. Many saw it as the Thatcher government's response for criticism that it had been too slow to act on the spread of HIV/AIDs.

Its impact is even better appreciated when viewed against other, more subtle, public information campaigns in the archives. The films, which can be viewed online at www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/films, include Coughs and Sneezes (1945). This offers advice on how best to use a handkerchief, which now seems both obvious and amusing. “That's the idea,” intones a mellifluous male commentator, when a thoughtless middle aged office worker is finally persuaded to sneeze into a handkerchief to reduce the risk of passing on a cold to his co-workers. In fact, the “coughs and sneezes” campaign was more concerned about reducing absenteeism than preventing workers from catching colds.

Figure 1.

Cartoons from Your Very Good Health (1948)

One of the key objectives of the COI, when it took over from the wartime Ministry of Information in 1946, was to provide health and medical information. The then prime minister, Clement Atlee, declared: “The public should be adequately informed about the matters in which government action directly impinges on their daily lives.” A short animated film, Your Very Good Health (1948), explains the benefits of the new, free NHS to a cartoon character called Charley and his family.

In a coincidental quirk of transatlantic timing, medical animated cartoons are being screened in Washington this autumn.

Across the Atlantic, screenings at the National Academy of Sciences this month will feature 10-15 rarely seen short animated medical cartoons dating from the 1920s to the 1960s, from the National Library of Medicine collection. “What makes these films so wonderful are the ways in which what happens in the interior of the body is imagined,” says the library's curator-historian, Dr Michael Sappol. “Culturally specific visualisations include conflict between the body and agents of disease, such as “enemy bacteria” in the post-war period; and the body as a factory, whose productivity is reduced by disease.”

The Traitor Within (1946), produced by the American Cancer Society, shows the productivity of homely blue-overall-wearing worker cells on an assembly line being disrupted by sinister, rapidly dividing black-clothed cells, in a “factory” which becomes the primary tumour site. Eventually, the cancer cells escape via a lymphatic system “river” and set up further tumour “factories” at secondary sites in remote parts of the body.

Figure 2.

Still from Coughs and Sneezes (1945)

Rodney (1950), directed by well known animator Shamus Culhane, tells the tale of a small town youth who is diagnosed with active tuberculosis. “The best medicine is plenty of rest in a tuberculosis hospital and good food,” advises his physician authoritatively. Rodney complies readily with his regimen of rest, recovers and is reunited with his girlfriend. The health message driven home to the public in Rodney's story is that his illness was diagnosed early and he recovered because he was “smart enough to have a medical check-up once a year, including a chest x ray,” not because of luck.

Other topics represented in the library's collection of animated cartoons include dental hygiene, physical fitness, physiology, mental health, malaria, venereal disease, cancer, radiology, biological warfare, and the hygienic preparation of food. Although we are now amused as much by their inadvertent humour as by their intended jokes, the cartoons are fine examples of the art of animation. “These public health films are an unknown treasure trove of brilliant cartoons by animators who worked successfully in other genres of animation,” concludes Dr Sappol. “As such, they appeal to film buffs and deserve to be studied by historians of film, as well as by medical historians.”