A medical school called the Bijou

Ask teen-agers to identify the text site of any line in Ecclesiastes and few would succeed. But ask them to tell the origins of "Play it, Sam," and many could tell you precisely in which scene of the movie "Casablanca" it was uttered. Motion pictures, whether on a large silver screen or on a TV set, remain a major instructor of our young as well as their elders.Movies, at least as much as formal secular and religious vehicles of education, have formed the experiential and ethical framework for most of us in what we fondly call civilized society. Our concepts of medicine as a profession, for example, have been molded in large part by the lessons imparted by the stories we watch on TV or in the movie theater. The cinematic portrayal of the medical profession, and particularly its practitioners, is fraught with distortion, hyperbole and the extremes of beatific reverence or malevolence requiring that either we repent or prepare to sanctify some of our past colleagues.A favorite portrayal, for example, is the humorless medical scientist. And one of the finest films demonstrating the intimacy between states of mania and piety is "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," based upon the cautionary tale written by a repentant Scotsman named Robert Louis Stevenson. The classic movie version (starring Fredric March) was produced in 1931. Herbert Hoover was then president and the nation was in its third year of a major economic depression.Henry Jekyll is a wealthy and highly respected London physician who, of late, has been conducting secret experiments. Another character appears, an evil man named Edward Hyde, a person prone to murder. Eventually, it becomes apparent that Jekyll has devised a potion that, when consumed, activates the evil component latent within himself and that Hyde and Jekyll are one and the same.Research is research, sometimes fruitful, sometimes pointless, sometimes ailing when it is based on false data; but Jekyll's research is fatally flawed because it defies Hollywood's most fundamental ethical commandment: "At peril of madness thou shall not investigate the human soul." And Jekyll's ultimate cri de coeur is: "I have trespassed and I have sinned; and thus have I carelessly set free the evil part of me that Victorian civility has meticulously imprisoned."To the credulous child willingly learning the lessons of life from this film, it becomes painfully evident that research, of any fundamental kind, is a dangerous preoccupation, whether undertaken in a Transylvanian village or in a London laboratory.Yet another film of the 1930s, famous for its employment of trick photography, is "The Invisible Man," portraying a physician-scientist who finds the chemical basis for invisibility, thus violating yet another basic cinematic commandment: "Thou shall not bypass the barriers protecting middle-class propriety."The constant moviegoer in the midst of the 20th century finally learns that the path to righteous and faith-based physicianhood rests in rejecting the blandishments of remunerative Park Avenue practices or the moral swamps of research medicine; the true path is found in assigning oneself to a leper colony in distant Sri Lanka or a tropical village beset by bubonic plague. It helps, too, if the plague kills off one's faithful fiancee, thus freeing the earnest physician from any future conflict of interest, and therefore allowing him to labor incessantly for the salvation of mankind. The tropics, as a handful of films teaches us, becomes the appropriate venue for atonement and the restitution of one's medical soul.A few recent newspaper stories describe yet another impediment to the medical education of the young American in the 21st century: the very high tuition cost, in some instances over $50,000 per year. The film industry anticipated this problem and then provided its audience with that great classic of 1931, "The Sin of Madelon Claudet."This film, which earned the young actress Helen Hayes an Academy Award, tells the heartbreaking tale of a naive French maiden who is seduced by an American artist and is then abandoned along with her infant, born out of wedlock. Circumstances force Madelon to give up her child for adoption and a further tragedy befalls her when she is falsely convicted of theft and is imprisoned for 10 years. Upon her release, she learns that her adult son (played by Robert Young) is contemplating a medical career. Knowing that this will require money, Madelon enters the shadowy world of prostitution to provide these needed funds, while making certain that her son neither discovers her identity nor the source of his funding. To the end, she remains nobly anonymous, and yet, still, a fallen woman.The earlier medically oriented films such as "Arrowsmith," "Of Human Bondage" and "Frankenstein" -- each burdened by heavy moral undertones -- have now been replaced by younger physicians who have discovered that Middle America needs them more than does the sweaty tropics, and that they can save lives despite their playing golf on Sunday afternoons. And thus a new generation of physicians, on TV, beginning with Dr. Kildare, to Dr. Ben Casey, and then to Dr. Marcus Welby (played by an older and wiser Robert Young), are finally depicted as mortals capable of raising families, enjoying their marriages and making mistakes without atoning for them in the salt mines of Siberia.(Stanley M. Aronson, M.D., is dean of medicine emeritus, Brown University. E-mail smamd(at)cox.net.)(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)