Analysis Of The Film Wit Shows Us A Number Of Instances Of Foucault 's ' Medical Gaze ' Essay

Accompanying with the enormous technological progress, medicine as a modern science has been affected in many positive ways. However, the timeless tradition and the everlasting secret of medicine is merely care giving. Modern medicine has been relying too much on technology, which is cool, but also very cold from a humanistic aspect. All the patients are presented by a series of numbers via binary signals of the internet. Nowadays, medicine is more about running tests and diagnosing based on numbers, as opposed to investigating symptoms upon the physician’s observational skills and comprehensive knowledge. As bedside caring becomes less concerned as it was in the old days, the diminishing of the sense of caring in medical professionals appears as a side effect. There is no doubt that technology enables medical professionals to perform all types of fancy tasks, though it is their offering of compassion that comforts the patients the most. And this quintessence of medical practice ought not to be overlooked at any point of the history of medicine.

In the movie Wit, Professor Bearings is diagnosed with advanced ovarian cancer. She spends her days in the hospital with her nurse, doctor, and the doctor’s assistant (Ms. Bearing’s former student) undergoing aggressive chemotherapy. Although the movie was good, there were many scenes that made me cringe. Throughout the entire movie, the medical staff used non-therapeutic communication and were unethical toward their patient. They made Professor Bearings feel inferior, pushed medical treatment without considering her thoughts and feelings, and never explained exactly what was going on. I felt empathy while watching Professor Bearings go through her last days being treated the way she was.

Prominently featured in the mission statements of virtually of every medical school and medical institution in the world is the call for empathetic doctors. These institutions wish to train medical professionals that possess qualities of sympathy and compassion, and hospitals wish to employ health professionals that showcase similar qualities. The reality, however, is starkly different, as physicians, jaded by what they have seen in the medical world, lose the qualities that drove them to medicine in the first place. In Frank Huyler’s “The Blood of Strangers,” a collection of short stories from his time as a physician in the emergency room, Huyler uses the literary techniques of irony and imagery to depict the reality of the world of a medical professional. While Huyler provides several examples of both techniques in his accounts, moments from “A Difference of Opinion” and “The Secret” in particular stand out. Huyler uses irony and imagery in these two pieces to describe how medical professionals have lost their sense of compassion and empathy due to being jaded and desensitized by the awful incidents they have witnessed during their careers.

This paper analyzes seven view points on the topic of Philosophy of Healthcare. The seven view points are blended into this paper by discussing what factors highly influenced my decision to choose healthcare as my set profession in life. Also discussing the Nature of Mankind, stating a few qualities that are highly important in our society and give examples of how it is used in our everyday life. This paper will further discuss the Brokenness of Mankind and what I believe are my most important qualities that I will be able to bring into the medical field. Discuss

In the next stanza, the poet describes “A figure walking towards cloaked in blue/ Beeping/ Tubes/ Needles.” The poem addresses the routinely and monotonous aspect of being in the hospital for long periods of time. It is a critique of the biomedical model and how the hospital system is created where patients are tended to by multiple doctors, nurses, and allied health professionals. The patients and healthcare professionals are unable to form a relationship that consists of what Kleinman describes as “empathetic witnessing” (Kleinman). Therefore, detachment between patient and health workers is developed and established, to which the patient cannot recognize or know the people assisting them. In addition, Grealy discusses this in her earliest accounts and appointments with doctors. She states that there is a layer of “condescension” and is an “endemic in the medical

All medical providers have a duty to protect the health and dignity of their patients. Even if that is the intention of the provider, specific ethical dilemmas in healthcare may arise making it difficult for the provider to make an ethically appropriate choice. Wit, directed by Mike Nichols, takes the viewer through the healthcare of Dr. Vivian Bearing, an English professor, as she embarks on an eight-month experimental treatment to hopefully cure her stage IV ovarian cancer. As Dr. Bearing undergoes this treatment, ethical issues arise regarding her healthcare that compromises her well-being and dignity. George D. Pozgar points out that ethics is concerned with values relating to human conduct that focuses on the rightness and wrongness of actions, as well as the goodness and badness of motives and ends.1 It is clear in the film that the actions taken by the medical providers, violated ethical principles within the scope of health care such as patient dignity and respect, patient autonomy, and consent to research/treatment.

The film WIT, produced by Simon Bosanquet, clearly defines poor bedside manner in all levels of medicine, from the radiologist who performed the x-ray to the physicians in charge of the patient’s care. The film is based on a seventeenth century poet professor, Vivian Bearing, who gets diagnosed with stage IV ovarian cancer that has already metastasized. Professor Bearing goes through intense series of experimental chemotherapy agents that are detrimental to her health, yet everyone in the medical team seems to ask the question, “how are you feeling today?” In reality no one seems to really show true interest to what she is going through. The film portrays a lack of empathy for Professor Bearing, giving a sense of loneliness and hopelessness. The professors’ rights seem to be taken from her and the medical professional fail to treat her with the dignity and respect she deserves.

As society has progressed, Foucault explains, these practices have expanded into other institutions such as hospitals, schools, prisons and asylums. Bentham’s Panopticon embodies such disciplinary

Determinists would say that the developments on machinery make doctors lazy because it makes them dependent but instrumentalists would say that it actually makes them more efficient in the work they do. The improvements technology has had on health have saved countless lives. This is clearly demonstrated in the hospital with advancements in the machinery that is used. Equipment, such as heart monitors, has become advanced and is a necessity in health centers to assure the well being of humans. Another example of very advanced technology

This film offers the public an important piece of medical history through the telling of Thomas’ achievements in a way that is thought-provoking. Also, the social issues it raises, for example the relationship

In The Gross Clinic, the patient is completely covered up and you can only see the patient’s thigh and some parts of the mid-section of the body. Both white cloth covers the entire top half of the patient and much of the surgeon is in close proximity with the patient's body. In the Agnew Clinic, you are allowed to see that the patient is in fact a woman patient and are allowed to see her facial expressions and bare midsection of the body exposing the breasts of the female. This sharp transition in painting style undoubtedly caused large amounts of unrest with the public. In today’s surgery, the surgeons only encounter the part of the body that is hurt, as in The Gross Clinic; the rest of the body is covered up taking the human aspect out of the patient. This may be a good thing, as surgeons may perform better without seeing the face of the individual on which they are working. Although the Agnew clinic allows the interpreter to visualize the procedure it also allows the view to compare between the two paintings to analyze the changes in medical

In conclusion, Person introduces two conflicting opinions of the main message, medical ethics. However, there is a bias towards Jenna’s initial view, and the opinions of Lily and Alleys. Overall, the author uses this book as a way of showing us the ever-more relevant debate of medical ethics, but wants us to make our own decision of what view to

The movie “Wit” introduces us to a seventeenth-century English/poetry professor Vivian Bearing, who was diagnosed with metastatic stage IV ovarian cancer. Vivian is a special patient with a deadly diagnosis, and who is interesting for doctors due to the possibility of using new treatments. Problem with it was Vivian diagnosis was severe and she agreed to undergo tests, more experimental treatment, and more pain. We see Vivian suffering and absence of friends and family, personally, it was really hard to see that the only person who takes care of her was one of the nurses on staff. This was an emotional story of Vivian which at times I smiled, cried and felt angry towards some of the medical staff and disease.

An invention as an insight into the means of the sick to become a restored person. The understanding of this narratives serves as the beginning point for disease narrative ethics (Frank, 2013).

"Theories of the gaze and spectatorship are theories of address, rather than theories of reception in which methods are used to understand how actual viewers respond to a cultural text" (p-102). On the other hand human subject is not universal, it is historically and culturally dependent. The concept of interpellation is quite significant to understand the gaze, which is not just individual's act of looking, moreover it is in between the spectator's sustained looking practice in the field of rational meaning making. The authors also explain gaze by the notion of discourse and power, "discourse is helpful to understanding how power systems work to define how things are understood and spoken about (and, by implication, represented in images) in a given society" (p-105). According to Foucault, discourse is a body of knowledge that both defines and limits what can be said about something, but in the broad social domains particular form of knowledge can change the form any particular time period and in different social context. For example, Gene is also integrated with the system of power and ideas about knowledge. To describe this authors introduces Foucault's panopticon concept, where subject are seeing without being seen. In contemporary world camera surveillance, whatever it is turned on or off we are responding