<i>The Knick</i> and <i>Die Charité</i>: Historical Hospital Series and the History of Medicine

The Knick and Die Charité: Historical Hospital Series and the History of Medicine It is a gruelling experience, a one-hundred-second race against death: surgeons frantically struggling to stem the bleeding from the C-section wound of a young woman they are trying to save from certain death.It is a race that they lose.The haemorrhage cannot be controlled.Blood seeps into the wound, covers the operating table, fills the containers of the vacuum pump.The patient dies.The introductory scene of The Knick gives us an idea of what it meant to lose control in early twentieth-century surgery.It makes the viewer experience medical history through the medium of film.It also shows what role fictional movies and television series can have in teaching the history of medicine.Medical themes are popular in historically themed movies and series.The grisly exploits of naval surgeons, the elegance and erudition of elite physicians, the altruistic self-abandonment of the ideal nurse: depicting medicine from the past has been a successful recipe for entertaining modern mass audiences, spicing up narrative plots with drama, heroism, and sheer violence.We can watch patients enduring surgery without anaesthesia and succumbing to wound fever, all while leaning back in our armchair, relieved that we are living in more enlightened and technically advanced times.In the following I will look at two recent examples of historical hospital series and highlight some of the functions the genre can fulfil in the teaching of medical history.My first example is the wildly popular Steven Soederberg serial, The Knick, launched in 2014 and continued for two seasons.The series is set in the fictional Knickerbocker Hospital in early twentieth-century New York City.Its main plot tells the story of Dr John Thackery, the hospital's newly appointed chief surgeon.Thackery is an invented character, inspired by the life of the real surgeon William Halsted.Ambitious, daring, and scientifically minded, he embodies (and eloquently proclaims) the advent of medical progress.But, like the real-life surgeon, he has a dark side: typical for his time, he is driven by racial prejudice, and, like the original Halsted, his addiction to opium and cocaine forces him to lead a double life, though a rather romanticised one with frequent side trips to the New York opium dens.Nevertheless, The Knick tells a heroic story of progress and scientific advancement.Set in the supposedly dark pre-advancement times, it squarely fits into the pattern of grisly surgery stories.The category 'dark' can be taken literally in this case: shot in natural light, Soederberg's imagery succeeds in evoking the same apprehensive emotional response one experiences when looking at historical photographs of past medical practices.That is no coincidence.The Knick's visuals are, in fact, the exact, and quite astounding replication of the images of the Burns collection of historical medical photographs, often down to the smallest detaila veritable tableau vivant.In this sense, the series offers a reliable visual reconstruction of surgery and hospital practices of the past.Students can learn a lot about the history of surgery and the history of hospitals (not only concerning their architecture, but also their governance and funding).However, the gloomy atmosphere created by the series' visual language surely does not represent what people felt about the latest achievements of surgery at the time.It is rather what the filmmakers want us to feel about surgery in the past.For the history of medicine, this is, of course, a teachable moment.This specific effect of the visuals provides an opportunity to discuss historical images,

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