Jacob Sarnoff (1886–1961) was a pioneering physician-filmmaker. He was an early and enthusiastic proponent of using film to educate new physicians and demonstrate surgical procedures. He made hundreds of films, some of which survive in the archives of the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland.
I’m interested in Jacob Sarnoff because I think his films show us something interesting about the endeavor of putting human anatomy on film. Sarnoff makes use of a wide range of techniques — everything from animation to dissection — to make the body legible on film. They show us how hard it is to capture human anatomy on film, and how much manipulation is required to make the human body conform to surgical diagrams.
Sarnoff and his films are the subject of the second chapter of my dissertation. In this presentation, which I gave at the Society for Cinema Studies in New Orleans in March 2011, I explain who Sarnoff was and what his films can tell us about surgical sight.