The Doctor

Jack MacKee is a successful heart surgeon. He jokes in the operating room, refers to patients by their cases rather than their names, and treats emotional distance as a professional virtue. Then a growth appears in his throat. He becomes a patient in his own hospital and experiences from the other side everything he has practised for years: waiting rooms, forms, doctors who will not talk to him. Randa Haines directs. William Hurt plays MacKee, whom Haines had already directed in Children of a Lesser God. Christine Lahti plays his wife Anne and Elizabeth Perkins plays June, whom he meets as a fellow patient. The source is not fiction. It is A Taste of My Own Medicine, Dr. Edward Rosenbaum's memoir of his own illness. The film's most durable effect was not in cinema but in medical education. It has been shown for years in medical schools in the United States and elsewhere to open the question of the doctor and patient relationship, and it remains one of the most widely used films in empathy training. Who it is for: viewers who like medical drama and want to see how a health system reduces a person to a file. Who it is not for: the lesson is delivered a little too plainly. MacKee's transformation is clean and orderly, at some distance from the mess of actual illness.