Unhooking The Hookworm Analysis

Unhooking the Hookworm was a film released by the International Health Division of the Rockefeller foundation in the hopes of reducing the burden of Hookworm disease in the United States and abroad. It is a silent film about 10 minutes long, with intermittent slides containing english text. The goal of these slides is to explain how to recognize, prevent and treat hookworm disease. It follows the story of a young boy in the American South who runs barefooted around his outhouse and picks up hookworm. He is brought to a doctor by his father, where the doctor gives him medicine and sends him on his way. The film’s success in America meant “Copies were distributed to Australia, Borneo, China, Colombia, Dutch Guiana, Egypt, India, Jamaica...etc” (Rockarch.org) However, the movie was only translated into “Spanish, French, and Portuguese” (Rockarch.org), notably, many of the countries it was sent to speak languages other than the four it was presented in. Unhooking the Hookworm is important because it demonstrates a representative lack of foresight by Western medical professionals in the exportation of their medical techniques abroad. The familiar sights of America lose their context, and the details of the movie are lost when the audience is assumed

Where I to write history related to medicine, I would use Unhooking the Hookworm to illustrate the broader problem of the nearsightedness of Western medicine. While the film may have been effective in America, the ability of the film to educate abroad must be brought into question. The fact that the film was notably not translated into Chinese or Arabic, but was distributed to China and Egypt, means there were likely large crowds of people watching this film in complete confusion. The inability of the IHD to create a product suitable for exportation and effective implementation mirrors well the problems eradication campaigns themselves faced when moved from their countries of genesis to their countries of