Medicine on Screen is a curated portal to the National Library of Medicine (NLM) historical audiovisual collections. This site showcases unique, rare, and important medical films enriched with contextual information, scholarly essays, and related resources.
NLM holds a world-renowned historical audiovisual collection of nearly 10,000 titles from the silent era to the present. These films cover a broad range of medical and health-related topics, from public health, surgery, and nursing to mental health, cancer, communicable diseases, child development, tropical medicine, genetics, and substance abuse. Some are public or military education films, some are professional training films, and some document scientific or medical research. The collection does not generally include Hollywood-type entertainment films, though the occasional celebrity name does appear, for example, Gene Kelly directed and starred in a WWII-era naval training film. Many of these films are rare, and in some cases NLM may have the only surviving copy.
Explore Medicine on Screen, find over a thousand digitized films from the NLM collection via NLM Digital Collections, and be in touch, via nlm-support@nlm.nih.gov, if NLM could be a resource for you in your research.
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