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Film Review: Patch Adams

Mikael Wagner
3 min readDec 12, 2024

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You gotta check this out. I couldn’t stop laughing and crying all the way through it. I really wish medical students were taught to care more about the patient rather than being a dick head and full of themselves. Check it out.

Tonight’s fillum was ‘Patch Adams (1998), starring Robin Williams, the great Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Peter Coyote. Set in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it is loosely based on the life story of medical doctor Hunter ‘Patch’ Adams and the book ‘Gesundheit: Good Health Is a Laughing Matter’ by Adams and Maureen Mylander. The film received generally unfavourable reviews from critics, with criticism for the sentimentality and direction. It was a box-office success and grossed $202.3 million against a $50–90 million budget.

Marc Shaiman’s score was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Musical or Comedy Score. The film was also nominated for two Golden Globe Awards, for Best Motion Picture — Musical or Comedy and Best Actor — Motion Picture Musical or Comedy (Robin Williams).

TRIVIA

The film has several major departures from Adams’s real history. One is that the character of Carin Fisher is fictional but is analogous to a real-life friend of Adams (a man) who was murdered under similar circumstances. Another difference is the 47-year-old Robin Williams portraying Adams as enrolling in medical school very late in his life, his older age even being brought up in dialogue. In reality, Adams started medical school immediately and his educational progress was…

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Mikael Wagner
Mikael Wagner

Written by Mikael Wagner

Mikael Wagner is a communications project manager with focus on health promotion, public relations , marketing and focus group facilitation.

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