When TIME/IMAGE was first introduced to the British Council’s archive film collection, we quickly noticed that amongst the culturally-focused titles there were a handful of technical medical films. We thought they were a curiosity and perhaps a little out of keeping with the rest of the archive. Unable to locate much archive material on them via our usual avenues of research, we thought that maybe they were failed experiments or not widely distributed. In short, we paid them no special attention.Recently, however, we received an enquiry about the British Council’s medical films, and thus undertook to investigate more thoroughly. What we found was rather surprising.

At the beginning of World War Two, the Medical Research Council and the Ministry of Information asked Hugh Clegg, of the Royal Society of Medicine, “to prepare articles on British social medicine in order to counteract German propaganda against Britain. German articles in the foreign medical press declared that in Britain only the rich got treated while the poor suffered in silence” (1). Given, however, the effectiveness of Germany’s propaganda techniques, he proposed establishing a more long-term operation that would “inform the medical professions in other countries of the current achievements of British medicine” (2) in the same manner that the French and Germans had been doing before the war. Officials agreed, funding was found, and the British Medical Information Service created, providing translated abstracts from British periodicals to a large number of foreign journals. Continue reading →