The Science of Television: Television and its Importance for the History of Health and Medicine

Abstract

From the live transmission of daunting surgical operations and accounts of scandals about medicines in the 1950s and 1960s to participatory aerobic workouts and militant AIDS documentaries in the 1980s the interrelationship of the history of bodies and health on television and the history of television can be witnessed.A telling example of this is the US born aerobics movement as it was brought to TV in Europe, with shows such as Gym Tonic (from 1982) in France, Enorm in Form (from 1983) in Germany or the Green Goddess on BBC Breakfast Time (from 1983) in Great Britain.The 1980s aerobic movement was contemporary, similar and yet differing in national broadcast contexts.Television and its evolving formats expressed and staged bodies and health.A history of fi tness or physical health, for example, could not be conducted without acknowledging and understanding the role that television played in bringing such fi tness programmes into the living room.Be it health-themed magazines, reports on medical fi rsts and threatening illnesses in the evening or aerobic workouts in the morning, television and its role in imparting the hazards of ill-health and in presenting preventive means is a rich source of twentieth century health practices.When public broadcasting was restructured and broadened in post-war Europe, television was still a relatively new medium.No one actually knew what its future would be.The institutions, aims, and uses of television were

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