Film

Coma

This chilling sci-fi thriller (1978) is director Michael Crichton's adaptation of a novel by Robin Cook. Dr Wheeler, played by Genevieve Bujold, starts to suspect something sinister after a series of mysterious cases of otherwise healthy patients going into coma after relatively minor operations. She becomes increasingly anxious and finds it impossible to convince any of her medical colleagues that there is something strange happening.

Doctor in the House

A gentle comedy (1954) suffused with mild innuendo and uncomplicated humour, was the first in a series of films based on the popular novels by Richard Gordon. We follow the life, love and career of Dr Simon Sparrow, played by Dirk Bogarde, and his colleagues at a fictional London teaching hospital called St Swithin’s. The medical students develop under the watchful eye of Sir Lancelot Spratt, played by Scottish actor James Robertson Justice.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

“Strange desires. Loves and hates and secret yearnings….hidden in the shadows of a man’s mind!” Generally regarded as a classic, this 1931 film was made by Paramount Studios and directed by Rouben Mamoulian. Based very closely on the novel by Robert Louis Stevenson, it portrays the anguish of the young Dr Jekyll who carries out experiments on himself to test his theory that people have two distinct halves – good and evil.

Flatliners

Medical students begin to explore the realm of near death experiences, hoping for insights. Each has their heart stopped and is revived. They begin having flashes of walking nightmares from their childhood, reflecting sins they committed or had committed against them. The experiences continue to intensify, and they begin to be physically beaten by their visions as they try and go deeper into the death experience to find a cure.

Frankenstein

Released in 1931, this classic and definitive horror film by director James Whale was based on the 1818 gothic novel by Mary Woolstonecroft Shelley, written at the age of 18. The film tells the sad story of the monster created by the archetypal ‘mad scientist’, Dr Henry Frankenstein, whose obsession with creating artificial life leads him to piece together this monster from various body parts of dead citizens, and suffused with energy from lightning.

M*A*S*H

This off-beat, dark comedy, set in a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (MASH) during the 1950s Korean war, was a thinly veiled criticism of the Vietnamese war being fought at the time (1970). Directed by Robert Altman, it features a group of surgeons, nurses and orderlies who retain their sanity in the face of terrible trauma by their joking and pranks, and anti-authoritarian behaviour.