Epidemics, public health workers, and ‘heroism’ in cinematic perspective
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 19005281 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Q Han (0000-0003-1915-3317, Twitter (United States), corresponding author), Daniel R Curtis (0000-0001-8355-4153, Twitter (United States)) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 36 |
| Issue | 4-5 |
| Pages | 450-462 |
| Publication date | 2021-04-15 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Visual Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1472-586X • E-ISSN: 1472-5878 |
| Publisher | Taylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/1472586x.2021.1907781 |
| OpenAlex | W3156563810 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
| References cited | 46 |
During COVID-19, acts of ‘heroism’ – particularly by ordinary people ‘from below’ – have been foregrounded, prompting complicated ethical issues in the public health context. By analysing examples from a large corpus of films about epidemics across the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries, this article investigates how cinema has represented public health workers. We find that the public health worker in epidemic-related films tends to be elite or an authority figure with expertise, often male – whose personal burden and sacrifice goes unrecognised by others, or even directly challenged ‘from below’. However, although the public health worker as ‘ordinary hero’ rarely features, the ‘human’ side of epidemiologists, physicians and bacteriologists – through either personal redemption and a return to more humble roots, or recognition of personal error, questioning of official regulations and authorities, and eccentric and unorthodox behaviour – makes these ‘elite’ figures appear more ordinary, bridging the gap between the two
Art · Elite · HERO · Literature · Media studies · Movie theater · Political science · Politics · Public health · Sacrifice · Sociology · Visual arts · Empathy and Medical Education · Film in Education and Therapy · History · Law · Leadership, Courage, and Heroism Studies · Medicine · Nursing
Women are most affected by pandemics — lessons from past outbreaks
Collective symbolic coping with new technology
Covid-19
Heroism
Maoist public-health campaigns, Chinese medicine, and Sars
A portrait of a woman as a scientist
The Boffin
Skirts in the lab
War metaphors in public discourse
Between Brains and Breasts—Women Scientists in Fiction Film
Of Power Maniacs and Unethical Geniuses
Lay perceptions of collectives at the outbreak of the H1N1 epidemic
The Oxford Handbook of the Science of Science Communication
A systematic review and thematic analysis of cinema in medical education
Suspicious minds
Public health crises in popular media
The Gendered Culture of Scientific Competence
The Female Burden Visualized
Politics and the Medical Hero
Plagues, Morality and the Place of Medicine in Early Modern England
Doomsday Ecology and Empathy for Nature
Cultural Representations of Gender and Science
Infectious Inequalities
Contagious
Introduction
"The "hospital superbug
The Epidemiologist as Culture Hero
| Unique citing works | 4 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,8 |
| Citation span | 2021 - 2025 (5) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 4 |