Whatever your ailment, the nation's best-loved film experts have the perfect cinematic prescription for you, whether it's a course of the Coens or a dose of Die Hard. And they're ready to cure the movies to,, taking their scalpels to bloated blockbusters and warning of the ill effects of overpraise. Where medical ignorance and movie expertise meet - the surgery of Doctors Kermode and Mayo is now open.

Similarly, changes are visible in the doctor's image from the kindly "Country Doctor" and the earnest "Dr. Kildare" to the arrogant egotists of "The Doctor" and "Malice". Intended to be both fun and instructive, the book has a lighter side that looks at clichés and stereotypes, such as someone shouting "boil the water" when a baby is about to be delivered, doctors as "sex maniacs," and ludicrous portrayals of surgeons directing their own abdominal operations. On a more serious note, the movies illustrate what the public has valued in doctoring, the changing attitudes towards science, and the evolution of issues that still confront and divide us. Assisted suicide or "mercy killing," abortion, concerns about health care costs and impersonal high-tech medicine are all in evidence. Two chapters deal with the virtual invisibility of women and black doctors in film.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Writing with all the passion of Love Story and power of The Class, Erich Segal sweeps us into the lives of the Harvard Medical School's class of 1962. His stunning novel reveals the making of doctors—what makes them tick, scheme, hurt . . . and love. From the crucible of med school’s merciless training through the demanding hours of internship and residency to the triumphs—and sometimes tragedies—beyond, Doctors brings to vivid life the men and women who seek to heal but who must first walk through fire. At the novel’s heart is the unforgettable relationship of Barney Livingston and Laura Castellano, childhood friends who separately find unsettling celebrity and unsatisfying love—until their friendship ripens into passion. Yet even their devotion to each other, even their medical gifts may not be enough to save the one life they treasure above all others. Doctors—heartbreaking, witty, inspiring, and utterly, grippingly real—is a vibrant portrait that culminates in a murder, a trial . . . and a miracle.

An orphan leaves Dark Ages London to study medicine in Persia in this “rich” and “vivid” historical novel from a New York Times–bestselling author (The New York Times). A child holds the hand of his dying mother and is terrified, aware something is taking her. Orphaned and given to an itinerant barber-surgeon, Rob Cole becomes a fast-talking swindler, peddling a worthless medicine. But as he matures, his strange gift—an acute sensitivity to impending death—never leaves him, and he yearns to become a healer. Arab madrassas are the only authentic medical schools, and he makes his perilous way to Persia. Christians are barred from Muslim schools, but claiming he is a Jew, he studies under the world’s most renowned physician, Avicenna. How the woman who is his great love struggles against her only rival—medicine—makes a riveting modern classic. The Physician is the first book in New York Times–bestselling author Noah Gordon’s Dr. Robert Cole trilogy, which continues with Shaman and concludes with Matters of Choice.

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A remarkable story about the power of friendship. Chosen by Essence to be among the forty most influential African Americans, the three doctors grew up in the streets of Newark, facing city life’s temptations, pitfalls, even jail. But one day these three young men made a pact. They promised each other they would all become doctors, and stick it out together through the long, difficult journey to attaining that dream. Sampson Davis, George Jenkins, and Rameck Hunt are not only friends to this day—they are all doctors. This is a story about joining forces and beating the odds. A story about changing your life, and the lives of those you love most... together.

Before the movie, this is the novel that gave life to Hawkeye Pierce, Trapper John, Hot Lips Houlihan, Frank Burns, Radar O'Reilly, and the rest of the gang that made the 4077th MASH like no other place in Korea or on earth. The doctors who worked in the Mobile Army Surgical Hospitals (MASH) during the Korean War were well trained but, like most soldiers sent to fight a war, too young for the job. In the words of the author, "a few flipped their lids, but most of them just raised hell, in a variety of ways and degrees." For fans of the movie and the series alike, here is the original version of that perfectly corrupt football game, those martini-laced mornings and sexual escapades, and that unforgettable foray into assisted if incompleted suicide—all as funny and poignant now as they were before they became a part of America's culture and heart.

Cinema and medicine have been inextricably linked since the earliest days of film, with doctors appearing in fictional films before criminals, the clergy or even cowboys. But why have healthcare professionals - often played by major stars - featured so prominently in film history, and what does this have to tell us now? Responding to Alexander, Lenahan and Pavlov's Cinemeducation (Radcliffe, 2005) which focused on the uses of cinema in medical teaching, this book instead examines what film has to say about medicine, its practitioners, and their cultural meaning. Drawing on a miscellany of films from the dawn of cinema to the 2000s, from horror and westerns to war films and art cinema, and informed by a film and cultural studies-based approach, this will be a valuable text for students of medical or film history, researchers in the medical humanities, and medical practitioners with an interest in the portrayal and cultural representation of their profession.