Summary:

The surgeon Jack McKee (William Hurt) carries on an outwardly successful practice while treating his patients with aggressive sarcasm and general disrespect. "There is a danger in becoming too involved with your patients," he warns his residents, reminding them of the surgeon’s credo: "Get in, fix it, get out." Then McKee himself is diagnosed with cancer of the vocal chords, and the doctor discovers patienthood. The process is enormously uncomfortable for him, as he experiences a sharp decline in autonomy and everything that goes with it, and he begins to develop some empathy for those he has always scorned.

Particularly inspiring are several encounters with a coldly professional specialist and a platonic friendship with a young cancer patient named June (Elizabeth Perkins) who is dying because her doctors failed to diagnose her brain tumor. By the end of the film, Dr. McKee is both recovered and converted, and in the last scene is requiring his residents to spend 72 hours as hospital patients as part of their medical training.

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Summary:

This made-for cable film is based on the real-life story of Dr. Gisella Perl (Christine Lahti) as told in her autobiographical book, I Was a Doctor at Auschwitz. Originally published in 1948 and reprinted in 1997, the book is hard to find now. The film tells how Dr. Perl, a Jewish Hungarian gynecologist, is imprisoned and forced to be a camp doctor in Auschwitz during World War II.

Dr, Perl lost her parents, husband, and son during the war years. She had to relive her horrifying experiences and difficult moral choices as she faced an immigration panel in the U.S. in order to get her American citizenship after the war. Accused of collaborating with the Nazis, she was eventually exonerated and practiced in New York, later immigrating to Israel where she did important work. There were many other talented women who also fought to live but failed in their quests and Dr. Perl tells of the spirits of these women also.

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Summary:

The sculptor Ken Harrison (Richard Dreyfuss) is badly injured in a car accident and finds himself in the middle of life permanently paralyzed below the neck and dependent on others for his care and survival. Ken is a strong-minded, passionate man totally dedicated to his art, and he decides he does not want to go on with the compromised, highly dependent life that his doctors, his girlfriend Pat (Janet Eilber), and others urge on him. He breaks up with Pat and fights to be released from the hospital, to gain control of his life in order to stop the care that keeps him alive and unhappy.

His antagonist is the hospital's medical director Dr. Emerson (John Cassavetes), who believes in preserving life no matter what, and so tries to get Ken committed as clinically depressed. Ken's attending physician, Dr. Scott (Christine Lahti), begins with the establishment but gradually moves toward Ken's position.

The film ends with the judge at a legal hearing deciding that Ken is not clinically depressed and that he thus has the right to refuse treatment and be discharged. In the last scene, Ken lies in a hospital bed framed by his own sculptural realization of the forearm and hand of God from Michelangelo's Creation of Man.

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Summary:

Matthew Modine plays Joe Slovak, son of a West Coast fisherman, who goes to medical school and has a hard time adjusting. The film focuses on Joe and the members of his dissection group in Gross Anatomy. Joe, perhaps because of the proud independence of fishermen, goes through most of the film with a big chip on his shoulder, refusing to take things seriously, showing up late for dissection carrying a basketball, refusing to consider the feelings of hypothetical patients, etc., while everyone else is trying their hardest to become good doctors. He falls in love with dissection partner Laurie Rohrbach (Daphne Zuniga), but he has a hard time there, too.

When Joe's roommate David is kicked out, Joe goes home to think things over. He visits Dr. Rachel Woodruff (Christine Lahti), head of Anatomy who all along has been critical of his attitude but is now at home, incapacitated with lupus. She tells him of her disappointment in her own career ("I made doctors--people need healers.") and in him, because he has never wanted to be as good as she knew he could be. She pleads with him to commit to being a good doctor.

Switch to the group's all-nighter before finals and the sudden labor pains of the very pregnant member. They all rush off to the hospital, but don't make it, and Joe winds up delivering the baby on a table in a roadside diner (soft trumpet fanfare from the soundtrack). Between Dr. Woodruff, who dies at the end, and the delivery, Joe gets the message about commitment, and he winds up with both good grades and the girl.

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