All have dignity. Star Trek recognizes a limit to mortality, that despite technology there comes a time to die, but death is not hastened it is ameliorated. Prognosis Faith, humor, humility, fallibility and dignity these are lessons from television medicine. If the excesses can be discounted, television medical dramas offer a peek inside a mysterious world of life and death, of victory and defeat, of heartache and joy, at once exciting and scary. It is a world of ordinary people making good judgments and bad, of brilliant diagnoses and glaring errors, of compassion and ambition.
Television ignores the thousands of small decisions, the little moments, the commonplace.
But it is the little things that make medicine what it is. And the good physician realizes that though illnesses may be commonplace, patients never are. It is a world that needs that cries out for the spiritual. A world in which Christians can and do make a difference. Andrew Seddon, M.D., a family practitioner in Billings, Mont., has written extensively, both fiction and nonfiction, for Physician and other periodicals.