Wit

This gem of a movie from Emma Thompson (2001, HBO Home Video) tackles head-on the issue of physician insensitivity in a medical field increasingly dominated by poor bedside manner. Thompson plays the role of a hard-nosed English professor whose otherwise brilliant career in academia parallels the obstructive roles professional hubris and lack of compassion can have in medicine as well. Playing a difficult role as a patient slowly dying of stage 4 metastatic ovarian cancer, Thompson initially delivers each line with the poise expected of an unforgiving professor but becomes more and more human as her life painfully comes to an end. She is the embodiment of what we loathe in college ("that" professor whose mother you would love to slap) and a reminder of the humanity behind the falsely fabricated mask of intellectual self-importance. No matter their past, present, or future, patients certainly deserve more from us than this.