Locating Medical Television: The Televisual Spaces of Medicine and Health in the Twentieth Century

Medical television programmes, across their history, have had specific relationships to places and spaces. On one level, they have represented medical and health places, such as, consulting rooms, hospitals, the home, community spaces, public health infrastructures, etc. Television producers have represented these places, in line with the capabilities of television technologies and grammars. Moreover, producers have borrowed their images of medical and health places from other media (film, photographs, museum displays, etc.) and integrated, adjusted and reformulated them into their work. But medical television has also worked spatially in the political sense of being broadcast internationally, nationally, and locally; therein interacting with differing regimes and polities. This facet includes regional and local broadcasting, as well as public-private divides, including pay television, advertisement and audience measurement. On both levels, medical television programmes have served to represent familiar and unfamiliar locations and medical modes to patients and medical or health practitioners. This issue of Media History on medical television follows the conference of the same title, Locating Medical Television, organised in the framework of the ERC funded BodyCapital project and the Science Museum London. It intends to locate medical television more precisely; to engage (medical) TV history with recent questions concerning the relevance of space within and beyond national borders.