Everybody’s talking about health care like it hasn’t been a problem for a long time. It was a major theme in the AFL-CIO Democratic presidential forum the other night, Michael Moore’s SiCKO got the backs of the insurance companies up earlier this summer, but really, problems with the health care system have plagued the US for decades, world’s richest country or not.
For evidence, I present The Hospital. The 1971 film starred George C. Scott (just a year after his Oscar-winning turn in Patton) and Diana Rigg, who’d been steaming the screens of TVs across the land in the imported episodes of The Avengers (and who makes a gut-splitting appearance in the second season of Ricky Gervais’s Extras, which watched the night after seeing The Hospital).
Network was still five years off in the future, but Paddy Chayevsky won an Oscar (and a BAFTA and a Golden Globe and a Writers Guild Award) for Original Screenplay (Scott got a nomination for another Dest Actor Oscar).
The story veers between comic and grim, with the inner city hospital Scott’s character is the medical director for in the process of expanding by tearing down adjacent tenement apartments where people are still living. Doctors and staff suddenly begin mysteriously dying. And an air of neglect and indifference hangs everywhere like curtains of gauze. With blood on them.
The situations, though, aren’t over the top like you tend to find in weekly TV medical shows. Chayevsky himself narrates the opening scene, in which a patient with chest pains arrives at the hospital having been diagnosed by his nursing home doctor with angina. At the hospital, the patient is treated for angina (instead of emphysema) and rapidly declines, only to be treated for severe heart problems and then die within the first two minutes of the film. A death in the emergency room is only discovered when the persistent and thorough billing clerk checks in on a patient/body lying in one of the waiting areas.
Those types of incidents are the foundations of the story, and lead up to one of Scott’s great monologues:
What the hell is wrong with being impotent? You kids are more hung up on sex than the Victorians.
I got a son, 23 years old. I threw him out of the house last year. Pietistic little humbug. He preached universal love, and he despised everyone. Had a blanket contempt for the middle class, even its decencies. Detested my mother because she had a petit bourgeois pride in her son, the doctor. I cannot tell you how brutishly he ignored that rather good lady. When she died, he didn’t even come to the funeral. He felt the chapel service was an hypocrisy. He told me his generation didn’t live with lies. I said, “Listen, everybody lives with lies.” I grabbed him by his poncho and I dragged him the length of our seven-room, despicably affluent, middle-class apartment, and I flung him…out. Haven’t seen him since.
You know what he said to me? He’s standing there on the landing, and on the verge of tears. He shrieked: “You old fink. You can’t even get it up anymore.”
That was it, you see. That was his real revolution. It wasn’t racism, the oppressed poor, or the war in Vietnam. No, the ultimate American societal sickness was a limp dingus.
My God. If there is a despised, misunderstood minority in this country, it is us poor, impotent bastards. I’m impotent, and I’m proud of it. Impotence is beautiful, baby!
Power to the impotent! Right on, baby!
You know, when I say impotent, I don’t mean merely limp. Disagreeable as it may be for a woman, a man may lust for other things. Something a little less transient than an erection. A sense of permanent worth. That’s what medicine was to me, my reason for being.
You know, Miss Drummond, when I was 34 I presented a paper before the annual convention of the Society of Clinical Investigation that pioneered the whole goddamn field of immunology. A breakthrough. I’m in all the textbooks.
I happen to be an eminent man, Miss Drummond. You know something else? I don’t give a goddamn. When I say impotent, I mean I’ve lost even my desire to work. That’s a hell of a lot more primal passion than sex.
I’ve lost my reason for being. My purpose. The only thing I ever truly loved.
Well. It is all rubbish, isn’t it? Transplants. Antibodies. We manufacture genes. We can produce birth ectogenetically. We can practically clone people like carrots. And half the kids in this ghetto haven’t even been inoculated for polio!
We have established the most enormous medical entity ever conceived and people are sicker than ever!
We cure nothing!
We heal nothing!
The whole goddamn wretched world is strangulating in front of our eyes.
That’s what I mean when I say impotent.