USC School of Medicine - Asklepiad Yearbook (Los Angeles, CA)

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F , f T The physician himself is now being examined rather provocatively not only in the novel, on the hypnotic T.V., but in the modern fi lm. Only a decade ago, as a dogtrot person- age without surname, the doctor entered some small chapter, serial of a 15 minute soap-opera, or interposed film scene to pronounce an actor dead or alive, then van- ished without comment. Not only has he now been given a longer speaking part, but has even become an acceptable hero. The artist on behalf of society sees him now as he once did the picaroon, the magician, the cowboy, the master jewel-thief, the inter- national spy, the aristocrat-detective— namely, the symbol of the contemporary jack-of- all trades, with the usual special emphasis on the chief trade of times. He is now interesting the world ' s greatest film directors: David Lean (Doctor Zhivago), Frederico Fellini (Juliette of the Spirits), and Akira Kurasawa (Redbeard), not to mention several others (Wild Strawberries of Bergman, on a retired physician, etc.). Modern artists love the use of a mysterious symbolic illness in analyzing contemporary society. And no fitter witness than the physician to explore it. Admittedly, such doctor-heroes are only inventions, squeezed out of the fictive imaginations of controversial artists; yet these film directors are the supreme artists of our time, oligarchs of taste, of craftsmanship, and thought, with telling philosophic insights— true Bellerophons yet keeping a firm grip on Pegasus. As it happens, their views on physicians are intriguing. ...and The following series of pages examines the diverse personalities of the physician. Certain figures have been selected to suggest the mood of the profession we have chosen for ourselves as seen by the members of another profession, the modern cinema. v 42

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O 1 M Next question yeah? nickle-dime! Don ' t coll us, we ' ll call you. But Herr Dr. Frankenstein, you remember how upset the villogers were lost yea O.K. Now, how do I get my fmger out? Now, reolly tellos, look at thot forearm . Have you ever seen anything like it before. And after assuming its tertiary structury, this gammaglobulin not only dissolved Keehon. but threatened all the experimenters with ultra centrifugation.

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concern In scene after scene of Zhivago, persons parade before us in double exposure: firstly as man the miracle, full of feeling, integrity, with dark design and perfect architecture; secondly, as animal, securer in a pack, without compassion, schemer, destroyer, blight; firstly as soul, then as body. Schizoic Yuri Zhivago, part poet, part physician, is the ideal hero of such a vision. He is also Lean ' s typical protagonist— a pure esthete forced into the irritating position of having to struggle for survival. In Zhivago, not only is the social theory of the Russian revolution thwarted by its body politic, but the sensitive young Yuri becomes also the defeated victim of his own body ' s powers and whims. A high tragic sense evinces itself when we see the physician-poet succumb to forces he has ironically groomed himself to fully comprehend. Although Yuri Zhivago considers himself physician first and poet second, there is a perilous contour to his physician ' s vision, the contour of the University theorist, admirous of the delicate beauty of the living creature, whether good or evil— awed at the exquisite complexity of disease and death, without the special schooling required to defend himself from their ravages. Lean establishes this study in the earliest scenes: Yuri: (spying through microscope lens a bacillus oozing through a rainbow colour field, overlaid in delicious liquid yellows) How beautiful! How very beautiful! Professor of Pathology: Yes, but these beautiful organisms do terrible things to human beings, Yuri. Those organisms turn out to be symbols of the physician ' s oldest enemies, spiteful inexorable fate, human depravity, ignorance: the Bolshevik manifestos, Komarovsky ' s debauchery, Strel ' nikov ' s brigandry, guerilla bands machine-gunning schoolboys, massacres, wars, conflagrations, the bitter elements, and the hateful elbow of destiny interposing itself between Yuri and his beloved Lara. There is also important mention of a mysterious 8 years spent in degradation by Yuri in Moscow ' s alleys. And through these episodes, only Yuri ' s eyes, wide in scientific glare, scanning packed crowds in trenches, in ambushes, in cattle-trains; and raising esthetic objections against the bold new society, which like a scanty cotton bandage cannot stem the life-blood leaking from the revolutionary wound opened across all mother Russia. Lean ' s main philosophic point is that the position of the physician and the poet often isolate them from life as helpless observers. Glass, in the ingenious ways Lean employs it, is the symbol of this isolation; and in each scene windows, lenses, eye-glasses, mirrors are interposed between viewer Yuri and the viewed world. Only when Lara, symbol of Yuri ' s private security, flees to Vladivostok does he smash the frosted glass window of the country estate, ending his juvenile phase, ending his poetic career, ending his detachment. The subsequent 8 years of wandering is only alluded to in the film. To me, it is the most crucial episode of all; since I wonder how much dirtying his hands made a difference in Yuri ' s character. But Lean limits his analysis to the esthete-physician, and, as in Lawrence of Arabia, does not explore the question of the maturation of an esthete. What Lean does say is that, as always, the trained and developed intellectual is utterly innocuous in terms of affecting the forces of the times. The aristocrat-physician loses his effective position of independence, once the imperishable children of the poor indenture and appropriate his technical services as their inalienable right. In this respect Yuri was the last witness of the passing of human compassion from the social milieu of his nation, stood with bitter feeling as the ignorant and untutored enlisted their betters in a scheme by which human integrity was effaced. And if the audience thought for a moment that Yuri ' s poems survived, it missed Lean ' s meaning in the last scene, where the symbol of the new society, the mighty hydroelectric dam drowned out in its billionwatt plunge the delicate modulations of the poet ' s spirit. 43