This medical drama is about Jack McGee, a skilled but soulless doctor, who finds the tables turned when he becomes a patient with a malignant tumor.
Justifiably, we associate surgery with detachment; surgeons may struggle to operate if they’re attached to the patient. That detachment has become so strong that it’s bled into phrases that have nothing to do with medicine: “surgical” or “clinical” precision, a “surgical” strike. We imagine robotic minds, hearts, and bodies, unimpeded by squeamish tremors.
To be fair, before residents are allowed to operate, years of practice enforce an emotional hardening. But Randa Haines’s film asks: Do physicians become superhuman by rising above emotion, or subhuman by eliminating it? Sure, the doctor must be aloof in the process of medical operations. But shouldn’t the heart be willing and able to reach out to those who submit so trustingly?
A Hardened Doctor
To Jack, surgery is about judgment; caring requires time. He scolds his instinctively empathetic resident doctors, “When you’ve got 30 seconds before some guy bleeds out, I’d rather you cut straight and cared less.” What he doesn’t do is explain why he’s so detached, even off duty. His cavalier demeanor, even at home, suggests that it’s so practiced, so habitual, that it’s now second nature.A wise-cracking narcissist, Jack figures that his rock-star status as surgeon entitles him to be insensitive towards his wife, children, and colleagues. He jokes, sings, even dances in the operation theater, like a celebrity guest-performer at a ball game. His patients are no more than stepping-stones or badges of honor on his wall of fame. He’s made himself so sought after, he barely sees his wife, Anne. When he absent mindedly asks his children about their school day, their tokenistic two-word replies confirm what they know: He doesn’t want to hear more.
New Insights
Jack discovers a new, unnamed feeling: Feeling sick. It sets the sick apart from the healthy. When mistreated, the sickly become hypersensitive to words, gestures, or care (or indifference) that the healthy might laugh away. A young married woman, with a huge post-surgical scar down her chest, asks Jack timidly if it’ll ever disappear. Ahead of her beloved husband’s transplant, another woman asks Jack innocently whether the new heart flown in is from a “good-hearted” donor. She hoped the donor’s healthy heart held as much kindness as her husband’s.
Eventually, Jack’s firsthand experience so transforms him that he alters his instructions to resident doctors: Think and act like doctors, speak and feel like patients.
Flipside Lesson
Firsthand experience, however useful, needn’t be the only path to empathy, or we’d all have to die to empathize with the dying. Our ability to empathize with young and old, women and men, sick and healthy, even animals, makes us unique. We’re the only species that bury our dead with deep respect for their memory.
Jack’s character arc offers a flipside lesson. Doctors and nurses are people, too. They have bad days, or have been indoctrinated by callous mentors. Haines says that education, medical or not, must teach empathy, even more than skills, so people can cut through the clutter of us-versus-them identities.
It’s fine if surgeons must rely now and then on robots to access otherwise inaccessible or minuscule areas of the anatomy, or to eliminate fatigue-related error. It’s also fine if they must steel themselves before surgery. But Haines makes one thing clear: Medicine or surgery may cure, and tech and tools have their place, but it is empathy that heals, just as the lack of it can keep people sick.
