Description:

The Master of Arts in Medical Humanities & Bioethics Program

presents

A Montgomery Lecture

with

Michael Blackie, PhD
Associate Professor, Health Humanities
Department of Medical Education
University of Illinois at Chicago

Medicine’s WIT
This lecture will examine key differences between Margaret Edson’s play, WIT, and the film adaptation of it. WIT is the story a female patient undergoing aggressive treatment for advanced metastatic ovarian cancer and her eventual death from the disease. Although both the play and film have been widely used in medical education for discussing end-of-life issues, doctor-patient relationship, and the ethics associated with a patient’s code status, the film has become the preferred form. Creators of the Wit Film Project, an initiative sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation that distributed the film along with teaching materials to medical universities, believe the film “should be required viewing for all stages of medical learners.” This preference is partly strategic. It is easier to screen the film than it is to stage or read the play. But there is more motivating this preference, this lecture will argue, than simply meeting the demands of a crowded medical curriculum. The film ultimately asks less of its audience because it converts the story of someone dying under the care of doctors into a story primarily about medicine.