The
National Library of Medicine, a component of the National Institutes of Health, has produced a new digital collection, Tropical Disease Motion Pictures. The collection comprises 46 titles from the Library's collections that illustrate the battle against tropical disease.
The materials range from research documentaries, interviews with noted scientists, and public health education campaigns, to films shot on location in regions beset by cholera, dengue fever, and yellow fever, demonstrating local and international efforts to curb their devastating impact. Produced between 1927 and 2007, the online content is a component of the Library's Digital Collections.
In the globalised economies of the 19th and early 20th centuries, Western societies came up sharply against the constraints imposed by tropical diseases. Cholera, malaria, yellow fever and other widespread diseases factored into the logic of empire: in war, commerce, and industry. Ambitious plans for global development were often thwarted by the burden of disease, with its attendant conditions of poverty, hunger, and loss of productivity. Through this collection, the western response to tropical disease is vividly shown, in multi-pronged campaigns of research, eradication, control, and education.
