DOI: 10.1097/01.ACM.0000363602.73961.a7
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Issn Print: 1040-2446
Publication Date: 2009/11/01
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Excerpt
Wiseman films in black and white without commentary or explanation. His gaze travels from department to department in the hospital and furnishes the events with a sense not so much of narrative, but of drama. The film opens in the operating suite where the rhythmic sounds of the ventilator and assorted machinery are the backdrop for the perfunctory compulsions of the surgical team as they prep and drape the patient and stretch the black strands of suture material on the operating stand. They mask and gown for the operation with a familiar air of nonchalance. The operating staff look like characters out of black and white photographs of the period; their dark glasses are thickly rimmed and their dark hair protrudes from under their operating caps. Even their arms appear hairier.
The tools are different. The anesthesia machine connects via a corrugated black rubber hose to a black rubber mask (who knows how many times it was used and reused?) that must have looked ominous to the patient as it was lowered to his face. The aesthetics of technology have changed: For one, we use clear and soft plastic now, suitable for the new transparency of the doctor–patient relationship. Before, the machines were more mechanical than electronic. They clicked and whirred. Now they beep.
Although the tools have changed, the patients and their basic problems are the same, as if the hospital is a performance of the same play staged every day in different settings since the beginning of medicine. From my own experience as an emergency doctor in Brooklyn, I recognize with some tenderness in Wiseman's film the intoxicated patient who has put his pants on backwards, who is chastised in a familiar way by the ED staff. The nurses who fuss over an abandoned child. The man who wants to leave against medical advice and averts his eyes, a combination of stubbornness and deference to authority. The foreign medical graduates who line up obediently in front of the attending pathologist who holds an atrophied brain in his hand. His own large and glossy forehead, captured by Wiseman in close-up, suggests significant brain matter.
Watching Hospital, we get the impression that there was once something more intimate and physical about the practice of medicine. Without the benefit of CAT scans, MRIs, and ultrasound, the doctors always seem to have their hands on the patients. They try to divine by feeling. A doctor listens to a man's lungs, his head next to the patient's head as he whispers, “one, two, three” and the patient whispers back, “one, two, three.” Who knew that whispered pectoriloquy could seem like such an intimacy? Later, we watch as a man who has been stabbed in the neck is attended by a team in white scrubs. He is seated upright on a chair, squarely facing the camera as if posing for a painting. The team removes his shirt, revealing a pulsing wound on his neck, which they compress with their bare hands. The barriers and precautions and the fear of blood-borne transmission were not yet in place in that more innocent time.
