A Matter of Life and Death - Magic Moments in Medicine

The history of medicine is a long journey of triumphs and setbacks in the fight against disease and death. It is about taboo infringements, daring experiments and dangerous self-tests, but also about mere chances, which have resulted in groundbreaking discoveries.

The four-part documentary examines medical history in an exciting, instructive and comprehensive manner. The four episodes, each 45 minutes in length, draw an impressive picture of medicine and its outstanding characters.

Despite the exceptionally large subject matter and the vast amount of topics to be discussed in medical history, they can still be structured and made accessible to the viewers.

Each episode focuses on one of the four phases in a human’s life, including their respective risks of life and limb. A garden party, where four generations of a family come together, functions as a thread that acts as a guide through the series. All family members survived life-threatening diseases. Their medical fate leads the viewers back to the magic moments in medicine, without which they would not have been able to survive.

The viewers literally experience firsthand the earliest hemostasis during a surgery by army doctor Ambroise Paré in 1552. Together with Ignaz Semmelweis you discover the reason for the fatal childbed fever in 19th-century Vienna and you experience the dramatic testing of insulin 1929 in a small lab in Toronto. The documentaries lead the viewer to the sites of medical history: to the ether-dome in Boston, where on October 16, 1846 the first narcosis paved the way for modern surgery and to a London lab in 1928, where Alexander Fleming discovered the life-saving penicillin by accident.

World-famous collections concerning the history of medicine, such as the Josephinum in Vienna, open their doors and showcases for the TV-viewers. Pioneers like heart surgeon Norman Shumway, teacher of Christiaan Barnard, and Nobel Prize winner Joseph Murray, who for the first time successfully transplanted a kidney, report about the beginnings of organ transplantation-- the start of a new era in medical history.

During the series, magic moments in medicine are revived in film-like drama scenes, partially shot at original locations such as the summer house of Edward Jenners in Berkeley, serving as first vaccination ward in history. Unique, previously unreleased archive material shows the viewers the filmic milestones of medical history. For the first time they see pictures of the early years of ultrasonic-technology from 1930 and 1950, the earliest footage about the fabrication of prosthesis from 1918 and earliest filmic insights into tuberculosis therapy, thanks to pictures showing the light- and air-sanatoriums of the 1930s.

“A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH” was nominated for the renowned Adolf-Grimme-Preis in 2004.

Episode 1: Deadly Germs

Episode 2: High-risk Surgeries

Episode 3: Reliable Diagnoses

Episode 4: Contended Therapies

4 x 45’ / 4 x 52’
WDR, NDR, SWR, ARTE, GUD