Plot hole?

I have an older friend who remembers the 50's. We both watched the film last night and she brought this up and said that was normal back then for doctors not to tell wives anything about how they were treating their husbands. If a wife didn't assert herself, then she was just ignored, as that was the role of women at the time. Interesting that at the end of the film, the wife is much more assertive with the doctors and nurses.

Also, according to the commentary on the DVD, the movie was based on a real-life
case history, in which the doctors deliberately kept upping the dosages of the
cortisone, in effect using their patient as a human guinea pig, to test his
"maximum tolerance," with similar unfortunate results. Because of pressure from
the medical establishment of the era, director Nicholas Ray had to divert
responsibility for the abuse of the drug away from the doctors and onto the
patient; the movie depicts James Mason's character as being primarily responsible for the abuse of the drug. In reality, the patient on which the
movie was based was an unwitting victim of his doctors.

The commentary points
out that Ray regretted having to bow to this pressure, and tried to get around
it by making "his attack [on the medical profession] through skewed staging and
odd interpolations....Ray films the doctors like gangsters, and in this respect, particular attention should be paid to the ghoulish, black-haired figure who gets a rather unaccountably held reaction shot when Ed first prepares to leave the hospital, introducing further subterranean currents of
paranoia into the film. He pops up again at the end...closing the door on the family reunion and pausing to give his colleague the most ghastly, cavernous
smile." --from the essay "Somewhere in Suburbia" by B. Kite, in the DVD's
accompanying booklet.

They weren't about to tell the wife anything until they got the chance to
experiment on their patient awhile. This still goes on with doctors and
prescription drugs, and the pharmaceutical companies who influence them.

I'm not crying, you fool, I'm laughing!

Hewwo.

Interesting. I never thought of that. With the confidentiality laws today, I wonder if anything would be different. I've seen the same doctor about meds for 11 years, and he has never spoken with my husband. And my husband's doctor has never consulted me about his medication. Of course neither of us is on little-known drugs.

Lol, I'm watching it now, where he tells terrified his wife, "GOD WAS WRONG."




"Joey, have you ever been in a Turkish prison?"