Students at the NYU School of Medicine rotate through Bellevue Hospital during their medicine clerkship. Many of the patients they meet come from shelters or the street. Concern about how their patients live outside of the hospital is a topic that is often raised in the weekly humanism seminar I facilitate, so I was particularly interested in screening the recent documentary, Give Me a Shot of Anything: House Calls to the Homeless, to see whether it would be of interest to my students.
The documentary follows a dedicated physician, Dr. Jim O’Connell, as he cares for people living on the streets of Boston. The project began as a short film about the Boston Healthcare for the Homeless Program that runs the house call program, a hospital clinic, and the McGinnis House, a respite center for individuals who need transition care during an illness and have no home to stay during their recuperation. During production of that film, the director, NY based Jeff Schwartz, was so drawn into the lives of the people he met following Dr. O’Connell, that he decided to expand the project into an hour long documentary.
I interviewed Jeff in his New York studio a few days after he screened the film at Harvard School of Medicine. Following are excerpts of our conversation.
As he spent more time out on the street, the people he met began to open up to him on camera.
As we continued our conversation, I became increasingly uncomfortable with the use of the word “homeless” to describe the people who appear in the film. It seemed to me that it would be just as simple to describe people by name or where they were from, or how they had been trained. The word “homeless” had become a defining rather than a descriptive word, not just in this documentary but in the culture.
During the production Jeff became more attuned to the lives of his characters, and the experience changed his life.
To view the trailer please visit:
http://www.givemeashotofanything.com/
-Lucy Bruell, Editor-in-Chief
