Looking back over my 10 months of third-year clerkships, one pattern emerges. No matter whether I’m flopping on the couch exhausted at the end of a long day, entertaining myself while on the elliptical machine, or trying to get my mind off the frustrating or sometimes heartbreaking experiences I’ve had in the hospital, I do the same thing. I watch medical television shows.
It struck me as odd when I first realized that this had become one of my main uses for the limited time I have outside the hospital. I joked about it with my fellow third-years: there must be some weird psychological explanation for my obsession with Chicago Hope, a mid-1990s drama about surgeons, while I was struggling through the harder parts of my surgery clerkship. After I finished the first season of Chicago Hope, as well as the clerkship, I moved on to my medicine clerkship and the 1994 season of ER. I have seen every episode from all eight seasons of Scrubs, though I quit House M.D. at the end of the fourth season. I can’t say that I have gotten turned on to Grey’s Anatomy yet ... but I do still have a few months left in my third year.
What is it about these shows that captivates me? Why do I turn to them even when, one would think, I would want an escape from the hospital and the notoriously all-consuming third-year clerkships?
Certainly, the explanation for the popularity of so many medical shows is that, even (or especially) for the general public, the field of medicine offers situations and relationships that are inherently fascinating. Watching the complicated unveiling of rare syndromes by the masterful diagnostician Dr. Gregory House, the title character of House M.D., has all the addictive qualities of a good Sherlock Holmes story—with reason, since author and physician Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s works greatly inspire House and were themselves based upon the logic of Conan Doyle’s esteemed colleague Dr. Joseph Bell.
But House lost much of its appeal to me after the first few seasons as the medical conditions became increasingly far-fetched. This happened to coincide with my first two years of medical school; my growing factual knowledge from classes and boards preparation allowed me to recognize House’s medical fallacies as well as its flagrant violations of the diagnostic dictum “when you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.”
The answer to the question of why my love for House has waned as my love for other medical TV shows has grown is that in the latter, I see truth—truth both personal and professional, which have never before in my life been so intertwined.
As the technically skilled, if emotionally troubled, surgeons on Chicago Hope saved life after life in the span of the swing of an operating room door, I recognized in their successes the fundamental attitude of the surgeons I met during my clerkship: this patient is broken, but we can fix him. And they often do.
ER third-year medical student John Carter’s struggles to balance humanism and clinical efficiency all while pleasing his resident are clearly based on the experiences of another Harvard medical student: the recently deceased Michael Crichton, the show’s prolific creator. His character struck a chord with me during the beginning of my medicine clerkship, as I fumbled to find my role on the team, learn the computer system, memorize antibiotics, present cases clearly but efficiently, and reconcile my idealism with the fact that I rarely got to spend more than 15 minutes a day with each patient.
Even Scrubs to me reflects fundamental realities, despite careening as it does between absurd doctor–patient interactions, soap-opera-worthy romantic entanglements, and even main character Dr. John Dorian’s fantasies about all-staff sing-alongs or curing patients with boxes of kittens. Scrubs’ frenetic pace reflects the fragmented and unpredictable nature of the hospital, where in one room a person is dying while in the next a person is being born, and some patients make miraculous recoveries while others unexpectedly spiral downward.
As for Dr. Dorian’s lapses into fantastical re-imaginings of the situations he confronts, perhaps they reflect the same underlying impulse as my own escape into the imaginative world of medical TV shows. Just as much as they are an escape from the current pressures and hardships of hospital life, they are also ways of making some kind of sense out of the experiences of physicians and physicians-in-training, acknowledging the drama and finding the humor in what we do, in order to return the next morning, ready for another day in the hospital.
Miya Bernson is a third-year medical student at HMS.
The opinions expressed in this column are not necessarily those of Harvard Medical School, its affiliated institutions or Harvard University.
