Northwestern Marches On, circa 1931

Warning: this film includes footage of research animals and the dissection of human cadavers, as well as outdated, offensive terms.

Silent, black and white film about Northwestern University Medical School, giving a brief history using still images and film, then describing the current operations of the school “for the benefit of our alumni and friends who cannot visit us in person." Intertitle cards describe the images and film that are shown. Most of the footage was presumably shot between 1925 and 1929.

Film clips include: the groundbreaking of the Montgomery Ward Memorial Building in 1925 featuring Elizabeth Ward and University President Walter Dill Scott; Medical School Dean Irving Samuel Cutter, MD working in his office; patients at the Medical Clinic, directed by Florence Olmstead; patients receiving treatment from Beveridge H. Moore, MD and others in the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery; various clinics and lectures led by professors including Isaac A. Abt, MD (pediatrics), Charles A. Elliott, MD (medicine), J. F. Delph, MD (ear, nose, and throat), Arthur Hale Curtis, MD (gynecology), Frederick Robert Zeit, MD (pathology), and Andrew C. Ivy, PhD, MD, with Ajax, the dog who lived for four years without a stomach (physiology); technicians operating an x-ray machine; students inspecting x-rays with Walter T. Bronson, MD; Joseph B. De Lee, MD, chair of the division of obstetrics, working in his office and being filmed while examining a patient; views of the Zeit Museum of Pathology and students examining specimens; students working in laboratories in the chemistry division; professors conducting research, including Leslie B. Arey, PhD (embryology), Loyal E. Davis, MD, PhD (neurosurgery), and former Medical School Dean Arthur I. Kendall, PhD (bacteriology); students in a dissection laboratory; a student examining a skeleton; views of Kendall’s bacteriology research laboratory including an electrically heated incubator; views of researchers at the Institute of Neurology with director Steven Walter Ranson, PhD, MD; and biophysicist W. T. Bovie, PhD demonstrating the use of the surgical current generator in “bloodless surgery.”

Footage of the cornerstone ceremony for the Morton Medical Research Building in June 1954 appears briefly at the end of the film.