The Doctor
Director: Randa Haines, Cast: William Hurt, Christine Lahti, Charlie Korsmo, Elizabeth Perkins (1991, 122 minutes)
Based on Dr Edward Rosenbaum’s memoir, A Taste of My Own Medicine, the movie recounts the story of Dr Jack McKee, a celebrity cardiac surgeon. McKee is efficient, arrogant and emotionally distant from his patients and also from his family. For him “caring is all about time,” not about emotions. In his view, a surgeon was to be “quick and decisive” and has no business to attend to the needs of the patient. Caring for the patient’s emotional needs can be paralysing for a doctor. Competence and efficiency is all that matters.
McKee’s world falls apart when he is diagnosed with throat cancer. The doctor becomes patient, and that too in his own hospital. He has to undergo the humiliation of being treated with unsympathetic professionalism as a patient even by his former colleagues whom he had treated with disdain. Jack is shocked out of his complacency when his colleagues subject him to the same impersonal treatment he had given to his patients. He comes to know how patients sometimes become victims of callousness and errors on the part of the health care system. He is forced to see the medical system from the receiving end.
Once, while waiting for his radiation treatment in the hospital lobby, he encounters a fellow brain tumor patient with whom he connects emotionally. His attitude changes. He learns the art of empathy. He learns to be humble and compassionate. Healed of cancer, Jack returns to his professional life a totally changed man. He insists on compassion and empathy towards patients and trains his interns to put themselves in the place of patients so that they would learn the basic ethics of medical care. He is reunited to his family emotionally. The movie is a convincing critique of medical care without a heart.
Gifted Hands
Director: Thomas Carter, Cast: Cuba Gooding Jr, Gus Hoffman, Jaishon Fisher, Kimberly Elise, Aunjanue Ellis, Angela Dawe. (2009, 86 minutes)
Based on the true story of Dr Benjamin Carson, one the world’s celebrated pediatric neurosurgeons, the film is a deeply inspiring story of faith, determination and perseverance that makes miracles possible. Abandoned by their father in childhood, Ben Carson and his brother grew up in a violent black ghetto in Detroit in the 1960s. But their illiterate mother knew the value of education and faith in God that she instilled in her children. The violent-tempered Ben bore the stigma of being the dumbest boy in the class. Racial prejudice also stood in his way.
Ben’s mother refused to give up on him. She believed that he was a smart boy, telling him: “You can be anything you want to be in this life.” She taught her boys the power of imagination. As a cleaning woman in the house of a professor, she sees the large library which makes her realize the value of reading. She encourages the boys to read books, developing in them a passion for knowledge.
Her sacrifices slowly bear fruit. Ben’s grades improve dramatically and his outlook changes. He wishes to be a missionary doctor. Blazing a brilliant academic career in Yale University, Carson is selected by Johns Hopkins University to study neurosurgery. The divine gift of his extraordinary eye and hand coordination makes him the best among neurosurgeons. In 1985 he performs a hemispherectomy, in which he removes half the brain of a four-year-old who convulses 100 times a day and restores her to health, while his wife is recovering from a serious miscarriage.
Carson performed the first successful surgery on occipital-cranio pugus twins (Siamese twins joined in the head) in 1987 after four months of preparation. In a touching scene in the movie, he declares: “It’s my belief that God gives us all gifts, special abilities that we have the privilege of developing to help us serve Him and humanity.” His story is also the story of two heroic women—his mother Sonya and his wife Candy who stood by him through the hardest trials of his life.
Dr Gigy Joseph
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