The two sides of the scalpel: The polarizing image of surgery in early cinema

Abstract

This paper uses extensive database research, film viewing and literature review to show how the field of surgery was staged in the early days of film history. It can be shown that–although surgical medicine was a subject in transition, and many scientific breakthroughs (anesthesia und antisepsis) made surgery less painful and more complication-free–filmmakers still frequently resorted to horror memories of the past and created a questionable, or ambivalent image of the surgeon, sometimes as extreme as the “lunatic with a scalpel” stereotype, blurring the line between genius and madness. But there were also positive staging’s: The surgical intervention was often captured on the screen as a last resort for clinically hopeless cases, with the surgeon often presented as a “deus ex machina”, the savior out of nowhere. Other specialties, however, such as plastic surgery, were mostly positively dramatized, which reveals a stark contrast to research about the representation of the field in the sound film era. A view at the fields of neurosurgery and (selectively) opthalmo-surgery rounds out the panorama of forty-one surgical films. In summary, it is shown that the early surgical film depicts the specialty and the surgeon in a highly ambivalent way, from savior to monster thereby reflecting one of the most significant transitions in the history of surgery and showing us what image was presented to the public–and thus to potential patients–in the movie theaters.