Summary:

The film is an adaptation of an award-winning play by Ariel Dorfman, a Chilean writer forced into exile in 1973. Through revelatory events affecting the three characters, audiences learn about atrocities committed by the Fascist government that had, until recently, ruled the unnamed country where the story is set.

Paulina Escobar (Sigourney Weaver) had been a political prisoner during the oppressive period who was tortured by her captors. After gaining her trust by treating her kindly and playing a tape of Schubert’s Death and the Maiden, Dr. Miranda, a physician (Ben Kingsley) cruelly participated in the abusive treatment of his powerless victim. Gerardo Escobar (Stuart Wilson), then her boyfriend, now her husband, had been editor of the underground newspaper and target of the absolutist regime. In spite of torture, she did not disclose his whereabouts and, in effect, saved his life.

Currently, Paulina lives with Gerardo in a desolate coastal setting. At the film’s onset, viewers note Paulina’s agitation concerning a news bulletin about the presidential appointment of a human rights commission charged with investigating abuses by the previous regime. According to the report, her lawyer husband has been appointed committee chair. The remainder of the film concerns victim, physician, and husband of that oppressive period who through strange circumstances are brought together during the night.

Reminiscent of a Lear-like heath, past terrors are howled out against a raging storm. On his way home Gerardo’s tire became flat and he was picked up and brought home by Miranda, a good Samaritan. When Paulina, who had been blindfolded during her captivity, recognizes his voice and pet phrases, she steals his car and pushes it over the cliff into the sea. Totally perplexed by the Paulina’s actions, the men pace about in the living room where the doctor delivers derisive diatribes about women in general and wives in particular. Gerardo, to a lesser extent, expresses condemnation and embarrassment for his wife’s inexplicable behavior.

When she returns, both men have had too much to drink; she finds a gun in their house, tapes the groggy physician to a chair, pistol whips him as he resists and shouts, stuffs her panties into his mouth, and begins a heated exchange with her incredulous and very angry husband. He wants evidence for her seemingly preposterous charge. She can "smell" him she screams; she found a tape of the Schubert String Quartet in D Minor in his car; and he quotes Nietzsche just as he did when she was strapped to a table. Under much strain, her husband agrees to a taped trial in which he will represent the accused and force a confession.

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When 47-year-old Henry Newman experiences testicular pain, he gets little pity from his wife, Arlene. His personal physician, Dr. Vikrami (a woman who has only reluctantly examined Henry’s "private parts" in the past) schedules him for an ultrasound study of the testicles rather than examining him first. A young nurse performs the test and a female radiologist apprises Henry of the findings-- epididymitis.

A urologist confirms the diagnosis, but Henry is more interested in learning that the doctor has a twin brother who is also a urologist. Henry goes to see his 80-year-old mother who resides in a convalescent home. She pesters him about checking on the condition of his brother’s grave. His brother, Aubrey, died as an infant, and Henry was born two years later.

Henry visits the cemetery and finds the small tombstone marking Aubrey’s grave covered by weeds and bird excrement. He tidies it up. When Henry returns to the convalescent home, his mother’s bed is empty. He fears she has died but then spots her exiting a bathroom. Henry tells her that he has finally spruced up Aubrey’s grave, but she seems oblivious to his announcement and just babbles on.

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Subtitled, "Essays from a Cancer Limbo Time," this collection of essays constitutes a memoir of living while dying. It was written during the time following the author’s acute treatment for Stage IV lung cancer, when she felt well enough to write--a period of approximately one year during which she was still taking oral anticancer medication. Based on journal entries and memory, Cumming reflects on what it is like to be in a state of "recovery" while at the same time, and variably, anticipating death. "I knew that my kind of cancer was not curable, and yet, for a spell, it seemed to have vanished" (xvi). How does one go about living in the face of "a very good partial response" to treatment?

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A man dying of pancreatic cancer has reached the point where the pain is no longer controlled by morphine. In the hospital he begs for death. The surgeon tells his wife, "To give him any more would kill him." "Then do it," she says.

He returns with three syringes of morphine and finally injects them, but the man will not die. How easy it would be to suffocate him! But the surgeon rejects this thought and leaves the room, having failed to provide euthanasia.

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Summary:

Dr. Gachet looks beyond the viewer with melancholy gaze. His eyes, drooped with sadness, appear to search resignedly for something in the distance; his skin tone is sallow. He rests his head on one hand, while the other hand rests precariously on the table beside him. Lines of color swim around and through the doctor--a technique distinctive to Van Gogh--all of which are directed almost uniformly towards the top left corner of the painting. Amidst this hubbub of color and energy, the Doctor rests impassively in what seems a commentary on his mental health.

Upon the red table rest two books and a vase of flowers. The books are titled Germinie Lacerteux (1864) and Manette Salomon (1867-68) and were written by two brothers who worked in close collaboration, Edmond and Jules de Goncourt. According to M. Therese Southgate, the books may thus represent the close relationship between Vincent van Gogh and his brother, Theo, which Southgate calls "symbiotic, and eventually tragic" (Theo became insane after Vincent's death and died six months later). (See page 207 of alternate source.) The vase contains flowers of foxglove, from which the heart medication digitalis is derived. The flowers, therefore, may represent the physician aspect of Dr. Gachet.

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This is a collection of 61 poems by physician-poet Richard Bronson. The first and largest section contains many poems related to the poet's medical life and experience, including several that arose from his formative and bittersweet years at New York's Bellevue Hospital ("A Bellevue Story," "I Shall Be Your Vasari," and "Pain"). Others re-imagine events in the history of medicine ("The Knowledge," "Plague Doctor," and "The Man Who Dissected His Wife's Brain")

The second section, "Ten Portents of the Future," contains poems that examine the symptoms and signs of contemporary malaise, but find the diagnosis uncertain and the prognosis . . . who knows? It appears grim, though: "I am a lame man / gone to seed / at the terminus of an age." ("After the Big Bang," p. 94) In his last suite of poems, "Six Aspects of Love," written to his wife, Bronson reveals his strong, but purely personal, antidote for the cruelty of our "barbarous times."

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Summary:

In 28 autobiographical stories, the narrator writes of his patient encounters (and self encounters) as a medical student, resident, and finally Emergency Room attending physician. "The Unknown Assailant" opens the collection, a tale of a criminal and his victim who are both brought into the doctor-narrator's emergency room. The young doctor chooses "the young one" (p. 1), not knowing he is the assailant, and works frantically to save his life. This criminal allegedly killed two men a year before, but his current victim lives and the doctor learns the story of the attack from this victim's point of view. The assailant, who slowly recovers, has "an aura about him" (p. 5) and the doctor is strangely drawn to him, thankful that this man means him no harm. Perhaps aware of the irony of healing a man who, in another environment, might kill him, the doctor helps the assailant get better.

This underlying theme--that nothing is black and white in medicine or life--shapes every story. "Prelude," is the revealing, three-page tale of a medical student's life outside the hospital juxtaposed with his first encounter with death in the anatomy lab.

Every story deals with significant issues: the physician's inner emptiness when a patient dies ("Through the Dark, Softly"), how a greater power might suddenly intervene ("Faith"), how narrow the margin is between a successful and a missed diagnosis ("Sugar"), how both patients and residents survive because of, or in spite of, their medical attendings ("A Difference of Opinion"), and how things that seem final or sinister--like death and leeches--become instruments of hope and cure ("The Dead Lake"). [Sugar and The Dead Lake have been annotated in this database.)

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A woman with breast cancer describes dealing with doctors and medical procedures, from facing "embarrassing questions" to the finality of the mastectomy itself. She copes passively with the procedures by escaping into a fantasy world; but when it is time for the doctors to remove her breast, she assumes an active role and "[gives] it to them."

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A 30 year-old woman describes with chilling power her three suicide attempts. She compares herself to a cat with nine lives and to a concentration camp victim; yet "dying / is an art . . . / I do it exceptionally well." The doctors/men that save her are the enemy, and she warns them to "beware."

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Summary:

Nan Prince is an orphan who becomes the ward of the local general practitioner, Dr. Leslie, upon the death of her elderly aunt. Nan and Dr. Leslie develop a close emotional bond. She is a bright young woman who enjoys accompanying him during his long day's work as a country doctor in Oldfields. They often discuss medicine and healing. Dr. Leslie encourages Nan to read medical books, while instilling in her an understanding of the intimacies of his patients' lives and a love of caring for them. He would like to see her become a physician, an ambition she soon begins to pursue despite many obstacles. She goes away to medical school in the city.

After her first year at medical school, she spends part of the summer in the town of Dunport where she is introduced to her closest relative, Miss Prince (her father's sister), and the "smart" society she has never experienced in the country. Miss Prince and Nan's new friends are all amazed and scandalized by the thought of a woman becoming a physician. They think the whole idea is utterly outrageous, especially for a young, attractive woman like Nan.

She meets and falls in love with a young lawyer, George Gerry, who asks her to marry him. With great emotional pain (but no hesitation), Nan chooses medicine over marriage. She returns to medical school and, after graduation, to spend a year in Oldfields practicing with Dr. Leslie. In the end she stands by the river on a beautiful summer day, raises her hands to the sky, and exclaims, "O God . . . I thank thee for my future!"

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