Revista de Medicina y Cine / Journal of Medicine and Movies (Jul 2015)
Cholera: tackling the epidemic in a hostile environment
Abstract
The Painted Veil (2006) is a love story which takes place in the nineteen twenties, between an Englishman, Dr Walter Fane, a bacteriologist, and Kitty, an English upper class girl, who marry for convenience hardly knowing each other. Soon after the wedding they move to Shangai, where Walter is in charge of a government laboratory. Also in Shangai Kitty meets Charles, a married vice consul with whom she has an affair. When Walter discovers that his wife has been unfaithful to him he threatens to divorce her if she refuses to go with him to a village in Inner China, where there is an outbreak of cholera and where his help is required. They settle on the outskirts of Mei?tan?fu. The relationship between Walter and kitty cannot go worse; they hardly talk to each other, and while Walter is working day and night, trying to stop the spread of cholera, Kitty feels lonely and useless . One day she visits a group of French nuns who collaborate in the hospital and run an orphanage, in which Kitty is finally able to help as a music teacher. The fight against cholera is arduous: customs, religion, and politics make the doctor’s work even harder. It is then that Walter and Kitty discover qualities in each other that they did not know of; finally love and reconciliation emerge. When it seems that the outbreak of cholera is already under control, people from downstream villages, where there is no doctor, arrive. Walter feels obliged to set up a refugee camp on the outskirts of the city, where he finally contracts cholera and dies.
