Abstract
Based on a survey of a variety of sources from medical and film history, an account is given of the history of scientific and popular educational films in neurology and psychiatry in Germany in the era of the silent film 1895-1929. A central event for the centralization of the production and distribution of medical scientific educational films was the foundation, in 1918, of the 'cultural department' of the Ufa film company which established, under the direction of the neurologist Curt Thomalla, a large medical film archive. Curt Thomalla was also the first who developed a dramatic type of popular educational film amalgamating medical and melodramatical features, thereby greatly increasing its mass impact, but also anticipating central elements of its later misuse by the Nazi film propaganda.