The Doctor(Movie) My Essay

This film portrays what happens to one member of the medical establishment when he faces problems normally confronted only by patients. Dr. Jack MacKee, a cool, self-centered surgeon who is in total control of his successful life until he is diagnosed as having cancer of the throat. Then he finds himself subject to the negligence, indifference, strict regulations, and humiliations which many have experienced in hospitals. Ignoring his wife, Jack seeks moral support from a woman dying of a brain tumor. June Ellis portrays this character as a healer who restores Jack to life — and to a new vision of what it means to be a doctor. The film gives us a fresh appreciation of the dynamic interplay between mind, body, and soul in the art of healing. The Doctor immediately lets you know that it's going to be about how surgeons really operate (in all senses of the word). Jack is a great doctor, yet years of cutting into patients, of treating human beings like meat, have coarsened him. He's acquired so much clinical distance that it now rules his personality. He no longer sees his patients as real, even as he's saving their lives; he no longer sees his and son at all. More than perhaps any movie before it, The Doctor captures the styles and attitudes of contemporary physicians, especially surgeons: the cool scientific bravado, the gallows humor, the abstracted sense of ''caring'' that allows some doctors to view their patients as subtly inferior beings. As Jack and his surgeon buddies barrel down the hall, forming a kind of superstar boys' club, The Doctor reveals how compassion and ego can jockey for control of a physician's soul.
Early on, fate turns the tables on Jack. He is diagnosed with throat cancer and told that there's an 80 percent chance it can be cured with radiation therapy. If that fails, he'll have to go under the knife and risk losing his voice. The Doctor is about how Jack regains his compassion through his brush with disaster. This film is one of the most