Optometrists are generally perceived to have received poorer treatment than doctors and dentists over their NHS contracts, but government contracts are not the only area in which optics receives a worse deal in comparison to other health services.
Optics in the arts is another area which could lead practitioners to feel aggrieved over the indifference shown to their profession by filmmakers and musicians. Television doctors are extremely common with some prominent examples being Dr Karl Kennedy in Neighbours, Star Trek's Dr Leonard 'Bones' McCoy and Dick Van Dyke's Dr Mark Sloan from Diagnosis Murder. Doctors in film are similar common with portrayals of the profession in such classics as Frankenstein and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Set in the Vietnam war, M*A*S*H's Hawkeye and Hot Lips bought screen fame to physicians.
Even dentistry is reasonably represented on screen, with the character of Jennifer Aniston's husband being a dentist in the television series Friends, while who can forget Lawrence Olivier's chilling portrayal of a Nazi dentist in Marathon Man? A similarly memorable performance of a German dentist came from Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther Strikes. In fact a search on the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) for dentist brings up 39 films with the term dentist actually in the title, including six films simply titled The Dentist, 2006's Vampire Dentist as well as The Avenging Dentist and The Kaiser's New Dentist. However the Swedish Dentist does not sound like mainstream cinema.
An IMDB search for optician or optometrist does not yield any results at all and if anybody can remember an optical professional in film or television please add a comment.
A lyric search for optician or optometrist show that the profession has not been referenced by any musicians of greater note than Ulster punk band, Stiff Little Fingers who sang: 'I want to be dead the optician said 20 20 but you stumbled round like you were blind.'
So what to you make of this imbalance? While the drama of a casualty ward might naturally inspire writers, horror films aside surely optometry deserves as much screen devotion as dentistry?
Opinion
