MEDICAL BREAKTHROUGHS 

Medical breakthroughs are often fascinating and Hollywood has  brought many of them to the screen. We all hope to have one about the cure of coronavirus before too much longer! For today, I’ll stick with what we have. 
The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936) is a very good one, detailing Pasteur’s swimming upstream against the medical establishment with his radical ideas that germs invisible to the naked eye can kill you.  Paul Muni won an Oscar for his excellent portrayal of the French genius.
Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet (1940) features a sterling performance by Edward G. Robinson and a splendid screenplay by John Huston in the story of the man who developed a cure for venereal disease.  Ruth Gordon, Donald Crisp and Otto Kruger add nice touches to this fine film.
Nick Nolte and Susan Sarandon are parents at the end of their ropes in Lorenzo’s Oil (1992). Their son is afflicted with an incurable degenerative disease and they refuse to give up trying. Peter Ustinov helps as a sympathetic doctor, while most of the medical community wants to throw in the towel. The child’s suffering is hard to take, and the ending is somewhat equivocal, but this film is a testament to the human spirit.
Greer Garson is outstanding as Madame Curie (1943), whose discovery of radium led to x-rays and other medical marvels. Walter Pigeon is, as always, fine as her husband. The movie does not tell you that their exposure to all that radiation killed them both, but hey, this is Hollywood!
Cliff Robertson, usually a plodding journeyman at best, broke out with a career performance in Charly (1968). He won an Oscar for playing a mentally retarded man brought to brilliance by a miracle drug. But as is also true in the next film, the cure turned out to be very short-lived.
Awakenings (1990) is a similar story with Robin Williams as the doctor and Robert DeNiro as a patient. Again the miracle turns to dust all too soon. 
These films underscore how far we have come and how far we have to go in understanding the human body. There doesn’t seem to be a film about these wonderful medical breakthroughs: AIDs medications, Ebola vaccines, flu shots, artificial hearts, organ transplants, and the polio vaccine. Fertile ground for more movies!
All of the movies in this column are available on DVD. All are suitable for children 10 and up.