Humanity in Medicine

Ben Casey

I must confess that I have never seen an episode of the medical drama House, despite the considerable intelligence and talents of Hugh Laurie, who plays the lead role. Nor do I enjoy watching shows filmed in what I’ll call dead color, whose palette runs from icy white to hard steely blue-gray, with flesh-colored frowning human faces in between.

But enough of that. My wife Debra and I have rediscovered an old medical show which ran between 1961 and 1966: Ben Casey. It’s in black and white, as it well ought to be. (As an aside, I cannot recall any other instance of artists suddenly and so thoroughly discarding so important and impressive a medium of art as black and white film was.) There are several reasons why Ben Casey strikes us as coming from a world that is now hard to recognize, even for people who are as old as we are and who can remember some of that world. I would like to discuss them here.

Human Attention

One of them is the sheer humanity of medical attention not overwhelmed by scale, by machinery, by the bureaucracies of the medical or insurance industry, or by the numbers of people somehow in orbit around your condition, none of which can be depended on to know more than a slice of it. Ben Casey (played by Vince Edwards—broad-shouldered, handsome, often glowering, but with a soft heart for children) is the resident intern and chief of neurosurgery at County General Hospital, set somewhere in southern California. It is a large hospital, with many departments and at least six stories. The neurosurgery wing is on the fifth floor. Yet even in episodes where one emergency follows upon another, we do not get the impression of a vast and incomprehensible institution, and of course we do not have doctors whose eyes you will not see because they are always staring at a screen.

Many a time we see Dr. Casey leaning over the bed, speaking patiently to a child, with a trace of a smile but usually no more than a trace, or looking hard at a grown-up, brows knit, trying to find some strand of truth in the patient’s responses or evasions, something he can use to make the right diagnosis or to prescribe the right treatment.

And since the show is not sentimental, many of the patients are beyond help; some who are not beyond help will nonetheless die on the operating table. One little girl, in “Suffer the Little Children,” having recovered from her head injury in a supposed accident that killed her baby sister, will go home to be murdered in short order by her own mother. No, the relentless Dr. Casey, who fiercely opposed her release but had no legal leg to stand on, does not always triumph.

Casey is not a functionary, and in those days, there was no Human Resource department to ensure that human beings would behave like machines with politically approved stickers glued to their front. He behaves like a human being, a rather large and markedly masculine one, too. He will give any slow or recalcitrant or irresponsible or muddle-headed doctor or nurse a large piece of his mind, with real anger, regardless of the sex of the victim. He is usually justified in his anger, at least partly. Sometimes he is not. But he runs a tight ship, and he doesn’t get paid much for it, either; he sleeps at the hospital and takes almost all of his meals there, too.

Human Frailty & Fallenness

Another feature of the show’s humanity might strike us as unendurable. Usually, there are two patients to a room, and sometimes three. That means that your fellow patient may somehow contribute to your cure. The first time I was in a hospital, I was only 15 years old, and because nobody local could figure out what was wrong, I ended up spending two weeks 150 miles from home in Pennsylvania University’s Graduate Hospital. There was an old man in my room, too, though I don’t remember why he was there. He taught me to play casino, and so we passed the time. In Ben Casey, the fact that you are not isolated makes it seem as if human life in all its glory and shame is still with you, as in “The Bark of a Three-Headed Hound,” which pits a terminally ill intellectual against an uneducated working-class man who must undergo brain surgery, and the intellectual, his malice partly excused by his hopeless condition, falls in love with the other man’s wife.

Then there is the assumption that longevity is not the be-all and end-all of medicine. The hospital can lengthen your life (or, if things go wrong, shorten it). It can sometimes restore normal function to an organ or limb. Now and then, it can even go a long way toward healing the mind. But it cannot have the last word. In “For a Just Man Falleth Seven Times,” a good and mild man (Lew Ayres, who could play such a part to perfection), knowing that he is going to die, leaves the hospital without telling anyone and spends his last hours not on a pleasure-spree, but enjoying some features of ordinary life among people whose like he had never really known, people lower than his social class. In “Use Neon for My Epitaph,” a Hollywood actor (Gary Merrill) chooses to make what he knows must be his last film, the stress of which will accelerate his incurable disease, and he does so against Dr. Casey’s advice, but appealing to Casey’s own commitment of his life to medicine, saying, essentially, that he and Casey both know that the work to be done is more important than the number of days either of them might see the sun.

But it should by no means be assumed that Dr. Casey would ever violate the Hippocratic Oath by doing harm to a life or to an organ, merely because the patient wants it. He knows his bounds, and even when he is correct in his moral fight for a patient’s best interest as against the wishes of his parents or guardians or spouse or employers, there is always the elderly Dr. Zorba (Sam Jaffe) to remind him of those bounds. But Dr. Zorba, too, will remind him of humanity and of the need to be more forbearing, because Casey is often frustrated by people’s obstinacy, folly, and wickedness, or sometimes what looks like wickedness but is not. That is the case in “I Remember a Lemon Tree,” as a brilliant young surgeon (George C. Scott), apparently running himself into the ground with overwork and alienating his longsuffering wife and everyone else, has been skimming prescriptions of morphine so that he can shoot himself up with it. Casey catches him, and we find out that the doctor is dying of leukemia and is doing all he can to keep himself on his feet and at the tasks to be performed. Of course, that cannot continue. But we see, as so often in the show, that the human heart can be deep and dark; who can fathom it?

Human Sociality

Or who can map the ways of human beings shying away in fear from what they perceive as alien and inhuman? In Ben Casey, we do often see a full world of human interchanges, of neighbors in that rich and daily sense that we have lost, whenever the scene leaves the hospital and goes out into the streets. In “The Big Trouble with Charlie,” Casey discovers that one of his interns (Jack Warden) has been checking out of the hospital as soon as he can, not to relax but rather to go to a pool room to treat the down-and-out, or the fearful, those members of society that hang together as their best support against all that seems to them big, impersonal, threatening, and in any case beyond their means.

There are a lot of lonely people in Ben Casey, but loneliness is not the default. Sociality is the default. We see it in “Allie,” when the teammates of a baseball star who has just lost an eye in an accident (Sammy Davis, Jr., who in fact did lose an eye, and it was Frank Sinatra who pushed and pushed his old friend and made sure he did not give up) come to visit him and to beg him not to let all his baseball knowledge go to waste.

Humanity & Faith

All of which leads up to the most important feature of Ben Casey’s humanity: it operates in the neighborhood of religious faith. At least twelve episodes, by my count, bear titles that come from Scripture or from some Christian prayer, as in “The Evidence of Things Not Seen,” in which a wise and mild-mannered priest (Wilfrid Hyde-White), dying but not afraid to die, seeks to heal a family wound, the rift between a woman’s husband, who does not believe in God, and her father.

James Moser, the creator and producer of the show, was also the brains and the animating heart of a previous show about doctors, the first ever on television: the half-drama, half-documentary Medic, with Richard Boone as the narrator and, sometimes, the lead character. Those shows, too, were often steeped in religious feeling; in one of them, the principal object is a crucifix.

The opening of each episode of Ben Casey is instructive in this regard. It is almost impossible to imagine it now. We see a blackboard and a hand drawing five symbols, each successive one below the other. For the first four seasons, the voice is Dr. Zorba’s: “Man, woman, birth, death, infinity.” The five are to be regarded as deep mysteries, elemental in human life, and though mysterious, they are also in everyone’s experience. There is no blurring between man and woman, no trivializing of birth or death, and no flight from the infinite. When Dr. Zorba is presented with the possibility of a miracle, he will not discount it; he has seen them.

As I say, it is hard to imagine the show now.

I wish we could have some of that world again.