Medical Dramas

From Production to Consumption

Edited by Solange Davin

‘A book that will apply theories about soaps or films developed in the 1980s to more recent texts will be a real asset on courses.’ Professor Jenny Kitzinger, Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, Cardiff University

While many television genres have been the subject of extensive academic scrutiny, medical dramas have been almost overlooked. The scholarly literature on these highly popular broadcasts remains scant and little is known about them in terms of their production values, their portrayal of health professionals, of medicine and hospitals, their place and role in the ‘infotainment’ trend and their impact on the public. This long-overdue collection of newly commissioned essays offers an in-depth examination of various aspects of medical dramas – production practices, generic classification, representations of gender, the body spectacular, content analysis, reception studies. The chapters explore a wide range of broadcasts covering four decades of television, from 1960s programmes such as the ground-breaking American drama The Nurses through celebrated cult-shows like MASH, notorious hybrids like Quincy and long-standing classics (e.g. the British serial Casualty), to the 1990s internationally acclaimed ER.

Editor: Dr Solange Davin was awarded a Ph.D. by Manchester University in 2000 for her analysis of British and French television audience responses to ER. She has recently completed a book on the reception of ER (Paris: L’Harmattan) and is currently editing a collection of essays applying critical theories to television.

Contributors:
The team of contributors have established reputations in their respective fields and are based in British, American, and French universities:

• Sabine Chalvon-Demersay is Head of Research at the CNRS, Assistant Director at the Centre d’Etude des Mouvements Sociaux at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Senior Lecturer at Sciences-Po;
• Jason Jacobs is senior lecturer in the School of Arts, Media and Culture at Griffith University, and is the author of Body Trauma TV: The New Hospital Dramas (BFI, 2003);
• Martin King is a Senior Lecturer in the department of Health Care Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University;
• Bob Lamm is a freelance writer and teaches at the City University of New York Graduate Centre;
• Janet McCabe is an independent scholar writing on contemporary American TV culture and feminist TV criticism;
• Stuart Nairn is a Lecturer at Nottingham University School of Nursing;
• Adrian Page is an Academic Leader at London Metropolitan University who teaches in the Film Studies subject area. He is the author of Cracking Morse Code: Semiotics and Television Drama (University of Luton Press, 2000), and has contributed to The Television Genre Book (BFI, 2001) edited by Glen Creeber;
• Deborah Philips writes on feminism and popular culture and is the co-author of Brave New Causes (Cassell, 1998) and Writing Well (Jessica Kingsley, 1999);
• Jeremy Ridgman is Principal Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at the School of Humanities and Cultural Studies at the University Roehampton;
• Jeff Shires is Assistant Professor of Communication at Purdue University North Central;
• Sara Steinke is an Associate Lecturer in Film and Media Studies in the Faculty of Continuing Education at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is currently researching her PhD on a feminist critique of television Medical Drama at the University of Reading.