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Correspondence to Dr John Launer, Associate Editor, Postgraduate Medical Journal, London WC1H 9JP, UK; [email protected]
The Japanese movie maker Akira Kurosawa is considered by many to have been one of the world’s greatest film directors. His friend and colleague Steven Spielberg described him as ‘the visual Shakespeare of our time’. Kurosawa is probably best known for his movies of samurai life, including Rashomon, Yojimbo and the most famous of all, Seven Samurai. These had a great influence in Hollywood, and many westerns imitated them. Some of his films were themselves adaptations of Shakespeare: Throne of Blood was a version of Macbeth, and Ran was based on King Lear. His 30 movies ranged over many genres, including love stories and psychological dramas.
One of his finest movies is a portrait of two doctors and a tribute to compassionate medicine. Its title is Red Beard, after the nickname of one of the doctors.1 The plot comes mainly from a set of tales by the Japanese writer Shugoro Yamamoto, although the final section brings in a story taken from the great Russian novelist Dostoyevsky about an underage girl who is rescued from enforced work in a brothel. Kurosawa made three films about compassionate medical care. He suffered from significant medical problems for much of his life, including alcoholism and depression,2 so the film may be his mark of respect to the profession.
Red Beard is set in a poor district of Edo (now Tokyo) in the first half of the nineteenth century. Dr Kyojo Niide is a red-bearded physician who runs a clinic and cottage hospital for poor and indigent patients. He is rather gruff and uncompromising, but his patients adore him. The start of the movie shows the arrival of a newly qualified doctor, Noboru Yasumoto, who has been sent there in order to escape embarrassment after his fiancée ran off with another man. He is proud, ambitious and in line to become a physician to the Shogun or ‘de facto’...