Body, Mind, and Soul in the Cancer Ward Margaret Edson’s Wit dramatizes the death of a literature professor from cancer. The play is designed to show the limits of the intellect to fully understand human tragedy and existence. Although the central protagonist Professor Vivian Bearin was a rigorous academic fluent in the works of John Donne when she was healthy, ultimately the fact her old English professor is able to provide her comfort during her dying moments by reading a children’s book provides her the greatest solace more than her philosophy and more than intellectualism. Bearin embarked upon an academic career because she was primarily interested in the life of the mind, not the body. The central irony of the play is that she is being killed by her own body with ovarian cancer. Ultimately, human beings are unable to escape the body in the form of death. The play is thus structured on a series of binaries or oppositions, including body versus mind. The only way out of this particular binary is that of the soul, and it is only though the compassion of the characters attending to Professor Bearin that she is able to find liberation in death.

The first few scenes of the play are presented as a conflict between rationalism and emotionalism. The doctors treating Professor Bearin for her condition are more interested in the insight her condition may yield for future medical research than its potential to save her actual life, bring her comfort, or even to realize her best interests. They view her condition rationally as something to be exploited—by using her as an experimental subject, they hope to mine her condition to help others. Little is known about ovarian cancer within the medical field and the doctors see Bearin’s case as a great opportunity to know more.

At first, Bearin sees parallels between their quest and her own dissection of the works of English literature in a positive way. Gradually, she comes to see the doctor’s medical research in a very negative light when she realizes that they do not have her best interests at heart. She feels dehumanized by the hospital and the institutionalization of patients and she begins to wonder if she dehumanized Donne as a poet, focusing on structure, verse, and punctuation, rather than the actual meaning of Donne’s poetry, which was intensely religious and metaphysical in nature.

The contrast between the different ways the body can be seen and language is embodied in the title of the play, Wit. Wit was something which was prized in Donne’s era as something which made people human—in other words, the use of humor. The title of...

This stress upon minutiae, or seeing the trees rather than the forest, is echoed in the doctor’s perspective upon the human body at the expense of the patient’s welfare. This perspective is in stark contrast with that of the compassionate nurse, who acts as a patient advocate. “Now is a time for, dare I say it, kindness. I thought being extremely smart would take care of it. But I see I have been found out,” reflects Bearin. Only the nurse and her human-centered perspective demonstrates the compassion Bearin requires.
Although the nurse is not well-versed in the works of John Donne, she also has practical knowledge of the law and the disease from which Bearin is suffering. She helps Bearin get a release from the treatment that ultimately proves to be worse than the cancer itself. At the end of the play, Bearin is in intense pain and discusses her options with the nurse Susie Monahan, who informs her that she can sign a do not resuscitate order (DNR). The physicians with whom Bearin speaks do not mention this to her given that in their eyes, Bearin is only a subject to be studied, not a real human being. There is a great deal of irony in this, of course, since medicine is ultimately supposed to be a discipline that is helping humankind. Bearin’s final release comes when the doctors attempt to resuscitate Bearin, only to be prevented by the nurse when she presents the DNR notice.

The young doctor Jason Posner regards the humanity of both the patients and the nurses as an inconvenience, rather than something he must give due consideration. Posner was Bearin’s former student but this does not make him more compassionate to his former professor. Rather, he simply exhibits the same type of hyper-competitive attitude to medicine as he did to literature and his classes. He took Bearin’s class not out of a love of literature but because he was aware that her class was particularly challenging and wanted to get a good grade to prove himself. This makes the analogy between the ways in which Bearin dissected Donne’s poetry in a cold and clinical way and the ways in which her own body was dissected by the research scientists, all the more explicit. Bearin herself was initially attracted to writing about Donne primarily because of the poet’s difficulty, and thus her own ego may have been a factor in being drawn to Donne, not an actual love of literature.

Her former student does remember Bearin as his professor, and says that he applies the rigor…