Abstract
Only three years after the public presentation of the Lumières’ cinematograph, medical cinema officially came into being with the first surgical films by French doctor Eugène-Louis Doyen, and with neurological films derived from chronophotographic experiments at the neuropsychiatric hospital of La Salpêtrière in Paris (run by Jean-Martin Charcot), as well as the graphic method proposed by Étienne-Jules Marey. Both are models of scientific film narrative about the human body which, with the consolidation of positivist science, helped to unite the discourse about bodily efficiency and economy. On one hand, by determining an array of corporal movement anomalies in relation to the new visual configuration of psyche, and on the other, by establishing the regulatory protocols in certain procedures in medicine from codified movements by the doctor who is filmed while working in the operating theatre.
