Cultura, salud, cine y televisión Recursos audiovisuales en Ciencias de la Salud y Sociales

Paul Valery spoke of film as a divertissement pour ilotes. We usedto call television the silly box. The box has grown up and it has become a mirror with which we talk, day in and day out, a kind of invisible friend that is a companion for our loneliness and watches over our discomforts (also defining and identifying them). Thus, our aim is to investigate medical dramas that cannot be reduced to the status of entertainment, even in cases where representations are less compelling. Boundaries between fiction and reality are porous and so require caution. Little rigorous productions with a simplistic language can have a much higher impact, also for teaching, than much more sophisticated narratives located on the boundaries ofdocumentary films. However, ethnographic approaches applied to medical dramas opens research perspectives regarding the construction of health, disease and care processes as well as concerning personal and collective experiences. Such approach has, from many points of view, a cognitive and educational function that creates reflections and debates, while allowscriticizing and interpreting the health context in which we live. If it is difficult for anyone to become Jack Bauer or Admiral Adama, all viewers of medical dramas bump into a reality that can be ours, as health professionals and as patients. So we recognize Gregory House or Nurse Jackie or features of hospitals and Primary Care Centers where we go.