Cultural sutures : medicine and media /

This collection of essays explores the interactions between medicine and the media. Twenty-two essays detail how medicine permeates the print media, advertising, popular cinema, television entertainment and news, documentaries, and computers. Most chapters concentrate on how medicine's media depiction affects patients, health care providers, popular culture, or medical policy. Editor Friedman provides an insightful introduction, and the well-chosen authors represent diverse disciplines. Among the book's highlights is a chapter detailing how news coverage of Dr. Jack Kevorkian in 1998-99 ignored bioethics or legal issues surrounding euthanasia, end-of-life care, and physician-assisted suicide. Another chapter notes how digital modeling and representations of disease have become more important to physicians than patient physical exams. Although there is a uniformly high level of annotation, the quality of writing is uneven. Some chapters are accessible to undergraduate students; others seem targeted for scholars and educators. This book, which is probably the most comprehensive analysis ever published of how media impacts medicine and culture, fills a niche. ^BSumming Up: Highly recommended. Library collections serving upper-level undergraduates and above in media and medical sociology; mass communication; film, media, and American studies; visual communication; health communication; medical history; and qualitative research methods. R. A. Logan emeritus, University of Missouri--Columbia