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OCTOBER 7, 2022
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A SELECTIVE HISTORY
POP CULTURE & THE AMERICAN DOCTOR The recent death of retired Augusta University president William A. Bloodworth Jr. was for the Medical Examiner the loss of a true gentleman, an ardent fan of this paper, and an honored contributor to our pages. The following is a guest column by Dr. Bloodworth that appeared in the April 20, 2007 Examiner. It was entitled “Calling Doctor Kildare: Doctor Kildare and the Romanticizing of American Medicine.” In that same issue, he asked us to print a public thank you to the staff of the Georgia Radiation Therapy Center, where he was being treated for prostate cancer. On television today anybody can see the influence of medicine on popular culture. Who knows how much money the entertainment industry has made from programs like ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy and Fox’s House — or how many other programs, movies, and novels have lifted their characters and settings from the Guest columnist world of medicine? Compared William A. Bloodworth Jr. to any other profession besides criminal justice, medicine seems to offer the richest source of material. But it wasn’t always this way. Not before Dr. Kildare. Some people will remember Dr. Kildare as a television character portrayed by Richard Chamberlain in the 1960s. Before that, Dr. Kildare was a radio character and even before that the main character in a series of MGM movies starring Lew Ayres and Lionel Barrymore. But Dr. Kildare did not begin on the silver screen. He began as a young intern in a single pulp magazine story in 1936. That story, “Internes Can’t
Take Money,” by an author named Max Brand, was the beginning of the romanticizing of American medicine. A year and a half later MGM released the first Dr. Kildare movie, Young Dr. Kildare, and by 1943 Max Brand had published 34 more Kildare stories, including seven novels. Kildare was wildly popular.
Even the American Medical Association praised the Kildare movies. The image of the American doctor was never quite the same again. “Internes Can’t Take Money” (using an older spelling of “interns”) presented a young doctor faced with concerns about his financial future (as alluded to in the title), an ethical dilemma (whether to accept money for operating on a local hoodlum), and a romantic involvement with a beautiful woman married to an underworld figure. The story was set in the Hell’s Kitchen area of New York City, complete with Irish-American criminals, saloons and politics. In that setting the young doctor, Jimmy Kildare, brilliant in knowledge and skilled with a scalpel but very poor, stands in contrast to the heavily monied politicians and criminals around him. The story — and Dr. Kildare’s future — ultimately is resolved by his medical skills when he saves the life of a key Hell’s Kitchen figure by refusing to accept the diagnosis of a senior physician. Instead of an infection, Dr. Kildare realized that the man was suffering from a blood clot resulting from a fractured skull. The details of the operation are vivid in the story: He cut the bone of the skull on three sides and broke off on the fourth. It would grow better that way when the piece was inset again. The blood clot was exposed before him. Kildare lifted out the clot. From a small blood vessel blood was oozing almost inappreciably. With exquisite delicacy, Kildare picked up the ruptured blood vessel with small hemostats and tied it off. And in the end, all the problems of the story are “tied off.” Kildare has proved his mettle as a physician, earned the respect of his community, and Please see BLOODWORTH page 11
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