IsisCB Explore

Article ID: CBB798514140

‘Items for Criticism (Not in Sequence)’: Joseph DeLee, Pare Lorentz and The Fight for Life (1940) (2017)

British Journal for the History of Science
Volume: 50
Issue: 3
Pages: 429-449
Publication date: 2017
Language: English

URI: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-for-the-history-of-science/article/items-for-criticism-not-in-sequence-joseph-delee-pare-lorentz-and-the-fight-for-life-1940/CB4C265FBB59158047E8CC60C885CC6D

DOI: 10.1017/S0007087417000620

Outside Links

PubMed

WorldCat

Google Scholar

JSTOR

Childbirth Reproductive medicine Motion pictures; cinema; movies Science and film Medicine and culture Obstetrics and pregnancy 20th century Lorentz, Pare Delee, Joseph Bolivar

In the late 1920s, the American obstetrician Joseph DeLee brought the motion-picture camera into the birth room. Following that era's trend of adapting industrial efficiency practices for medical environments, DeLee's films give spectacular and unexpected expression to the engineering concept of ‘streamlining’. Accomplishing what more tangible obstetric streamlining practices had failed to, DeLee's cameras, and his post-production manipulation, shifted birth from messy and dangerous to rationalized, efficient, death-defying. This was film as an active and effective medical tool. Years later, the documentarian Pare Lorentz produced and wrote his own birth film, The Fight for Life (1940). The documentary subject of the film was DeLee himself, and the film was set in his hospitals, on the same maternity ‘sets’ that had once showcased film's remarkable streamlining capacity to give and keep life. Yet relatively little of DeLee was retained in the film's content, resulting in a showdown that, by way of contrast, further articulated DeLee's understanding of film's medical powers and, in so doing, hinted at a more dynamic moment in the history of medicine while speaking also to the process by which that understanding ceased to be historically legible.

...More

Citation URI

data.isiscb.org/p/isis/citation/CBB798514140

This citation is part of the Isis database.

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Article Patrick Ellis; (2017)
A Cinema for the Unborn: Moving Pictures, Mental pictures and Electra Sparks's New Thought Film Theory (/p/isis/citation/CBB746930703/)

Article Jesse Olszynko-Gryn; Patrick Ellis; (2017)
‘A Machine for Recreating Life’: An Introduction to Reproduction on Film (/p/isis/citation/CBB170428762/)

Article Salim Al-Gailani; (2017)
‘Drawing Aside the Curtain’: Natural Childbirth on Screen in 1950s Britain (/p/isis/citation/CBB727495759/)

Article Carolyn Herbst Lewis; (2016)
The Gospel of Good Obstetrics: Joseph Bolivar DeLee's Vision for Childbirth in the United States (/p/isis/citation/CBB132407310/)

Article Wangui Muigai; (2019)
"Something Wasn't Clean": Black Midwifery, Birth, and Postwar Medical Education in All My Babies (/p/isis/citation/CBB729992204/)

Book Kline, Wendy A.; (2019)
Coming Home: How Midwives Changed Birth (/p/isis/citation/CBB696013674/)

Book Miranda R. Waggoner; (2017)
The Zero Trimester: Pre-Pregnancy Care and the Politics of Reproductive Risk (/p/isis/citation/CBB589678157/)

Article Eugene Declercq; (2018)
Introduction to a Special Issue: Childbirth History is Everyone's History (/p/isis/citation/CBB684240441/)

Book Hobby, Elaine; (2008)
The Birth of Mankind: Otherwise Named, The Woman's Book (/p/isis/citation/CBB000950392/)

Chapter Michaels, Paula A.; (2012)
Pain and Blame: Psychological Approaches to Obstetric Pain, 1950--1980 (/p/isis/citation/CBB001214272/)

Chapter Sheridan, Bridgette; (2010)
Whither Childbearing: Gender, Status and the Professionalization of Medicine in Early Modern France (/p/isis/citation/CBB001220303/)

Article Cormack, Margaret; (2012)
Introduction: Approaches to Childbirth in the Middle Ages (/p/isis/citation/CBB001231399/)

Book Sarah Fox; (2022)
Giving Birth in Eighteenth-century England (/p/isis/citation/CBB814819002/)

Article Nuttall, Alison; (2006)
Passive Trust or Active Application: Changes in the Management of Difficult Childbirth and the Edinburgh Royal Maternity Hospital, 1850--1890 (/p/isis/citation/CBB000773960/)

Article Lurie, Samuel; (2006)
Vaginal Delivery after Caesarean Delivery in the Days of the Talmud (2nd Century BCE -- 6th Century CE) (/p/isis/citation/CBB000932456/)

Chapter Read, Kirk D.; (2010)
Touching and Telling: Gendered Variations on a Gynecological Theme (/p/isis/citation/CBB001220304/)

Thesis Withycombe, Shannon K.; (2010)
Slipped Away: Pregnancy Loss in Nineteenth-Century America (/p/isis/citation/CBB001560642/)

Thesis Cislo, Amy Eisen; (2003)
Imagining Procreation: Conception and Gestation in the Works of Paracelsus (1493--1541) (/p/isis/citation/CBB001561975/)

Book Lara Freidenfelds; (2020)
The Myth of the Perfect Pregnancy: A History of Miscarriage in America (/p/isis/citation/CBB477937706/)

Chapter Bowles, Emily; (2013)
Maternal Culpability in Fetal Defects: Aphra Behn's Satiric Interrogations of Medical Models (/p/isis/citation/CBB001201694/)