Public Health, Visual Rhetoric, and Latin America: Steinbeck’s The Forgotten Village

Abstract

This essay analyzes the visualization of Euro-American medicine and indigenous healing in John Steinbeck’s 1941 documentary-drama The Forgotten Village. The movie juxtaposes film and medical discourse as exemplifications of modern, visual culture by showing excerpts from hygiene films and foregrounding medical imagery (e.g., bacteria cultures). The film displaces indigenous medicine by privileging a Euro-American medical model, and the gaze of oppression is perpetuated through humanitarian medical intervention. In short, disease is not simply a material fact but embedded in discourses about community identity, moral values, and politics.