Medicine and the Movies: Lorenzo's Oil at Century's End

• Physician-patient relations
• Motion pictures
• Patient advocacy
• Patient participation
• Adrenoleukodystrophy

Life has meaning only in the struggle.

Triumph or defeat is in the

hands of the Gods  …

So let us celebrate the struggle!

—Swahili Warrior Song, Lorenzo's Oil

With rapid developments in biomedical sciences and optical technologies, medicine and the movies came of age together in the 20th century (1). The relationship between them has intrigued a number of observers and scholars (2-4). Although the earliest movies about medicine were simple comedies about quacks, such as Dr. Dippy's Sanitarium (1906), serious feature films about physician-researchers and biomedical scientists began to emerge from Hollywood studios in the 1930s and helped usher in the heroic age of American medicine (5). Some of these films were biographical; others incorporated characters based, however loosely, on real scientists. Movies such as Arrowsmith (1931), The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936), Yellow Jack (1938), Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet (1940), and Madame Curie (1943) portrayed scientists as heroes and focused on the bright promise of biomedical research to control, if not eradicate, disease through the discovery and development of vaccines and antibiotics.

In the decades since, medicine has delivered far more than its early promise—not only antibiotics and vaccines but also such seemingly miraculous advances as kidney dialysis, organ transplantation, psychotropic drugs, artificial joints, even early versions of artificial organs. Yet despite this progress, the heroic age of medicine in the movies began to fade in the 1960s. Classic films such as M*A*S*H (1970) and One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) marked a clear break with the earlier heroic era of cinematic medicine. As physicians assumed anti-heroic status, patients themselves often became the heroes of medical movies, which depicted their struggles against death from diseases that medicine still could not treat (as, for example, in Love Story [1970], Terms of Endearment [1983], Shadowlands …