Modern Western Medicine In The Film 'Wit'

Franklin Leyva Jimenez
Allison Kavey
His 131
9/21/14

As human beings we’ve come along way from the ancient world, we have undergone a drastic change in the ways we live and go about our daily lives due to our technological advances. But the issue of medicine has not really improved in the way we treat, cure and understand certain diseases and how easily they target us. Even with everything we know about disease we still have some like cancer which we cant seem to permanently fight off and because of that we see that medicine then and now really seen enough of a change for us to fully eliminate disease and epidemics from spreading and further harming us. First, in modern medicine our ideas on how we base our understanding of disease
We understand what it is and what it does but the cure for it is still not there all that we have to combat it is chemotherapy. We see an example of this in the film Wit which shows the story of Vivian, an ovarian cancer patient which undergoes several treatments but realizes that they are causing her more harm than good with the following quote from the film“ I am not in isolation because I have cancer, because I have a tumor the size of a grapefruit, no I am in isolation because I am being treated for cancer ” Nichols "Wit," HBO, 2001. What we have to fight these types of cancers are just experimental radiation treatments that may or may not work. Some beliefs of ancient Egyptian medicine included the ability to accurately diagnose and surgically operate on patients but as seen in the Edwin Smith Papyrus: a clinical reappraisal of the oldest known document on spine injuries “ It is fascinating to see the shift of treatment goals over time. Whereas ancient Egyptian triage medicine considered the likelihood of survival as the most important outcome of interest, nowadays the quality of life is and functional outcome measures are the primary interest.” (Edwin Smith Papyrus, 43–44). Although they understood how to operate and diagnose they really didn’t understand how to correctly treat and would turn to religion as a scapegoat to what they didn’t
The way we approach what we don’t understand seems like we take steps back instead of forward by sometimes ineffectively treating patients in experimental ways that our doctors know have a low success rate. And although in the year 2014 we feel that were a lot more superior and advanced than people in the ancient world we are wrong because still see similar issues in the medical field and our most effective treatment to a lot of diseases seems to be to stay hydrated and wait for the disease to be fought off not necessarily eliminated completely. We also see that because of ineffective medicine we sometimes turn to divine forces and faith rather than expecting what we think we know will help. Even after this long we still turn to methods used in ancient times such as Ayurveda, and the way that Indian and Greek medicine believed in the imbalance of the body internally due to external factors and doing things like not eating like we are suppose to and because of this we are obligated to find a cure for the diseases that have been around and mutating for years