Calling Dr Kildare
Authors: Howard Markel
Journal: JAMA (2010)

MY EARLIEST DREAMS OF BECOMING A PHYSICIAN began while sitting far too close to an Admiral television set and watching the 19611966 NBC series Dr. Kildare. As a boy, I was astounded at how the bright intern James Kildare, played by Richard Chamberlain, and his irascible but wise mentor, Dr Leonard Gillespie, portrayed by Raymond Massey, always managed to cure their patients and send them on their merry way in a span of 60 minutes, including commercials. Years later I learned that this television show hardly represented the first time Dr Kildare had commanded a national audience. During my college days, a local cinema society presented the 9 Dr Kildare films produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) between 1938 and 1942 and starring Lew Ayres as Kildare and Lionel Barrymore as Gillespie. Also showing were the 6 Dr Gillespie films MGM made from 1942 to 1947. These subsequent movies did not include Dr Kildare—or rather Lew Ayres— because the actor declared himself to be a conscientious objector during World War II. Even though Ayres subsequently distinguished himself as a noncombatant medical corpsman, the studio dropped his contract. Over the course of a Michigan winter, I saw all 15 films. At the conclusion of each, I exited the auditorium into the frigid night, warmed by the prospect of someday walking the wards of a hospital, like Kildare and Gillespie, for the benefit of humankind. I was reminded of these idealistic impressions by the DVD release of the first Dr Kildare film, Internes Can’t Take Money, produced by Paramount in 1937. Featuring Joel McCrea as Kildare and Barbara Stanwyck as an ex-convict and single mother in search of her stolen child, this fast-paced melodrama exemplifies how much medicine has changed over the past 73 years. Its most memorable scene involves a gangster who staggers into a bar after being gunned down. Bleeding profusely and in need of urgent medical attention, he cannot risk going to a hospital for fear of being incarcerated. Dr Kildare, who happens to be enjoying a glass of beer between cases, instantly assesses the situation, plucks the strings off of a patron’s violin for sutures, shouts for boiling water, cutlery, and rum, and commences to operate in the bar’s back room. As the bartender admiringly exclaims during the procedure, “The kid’s got eyes in his fingers.” The next day, Kildare nobly refuses the mobster’s offer of $1000, saying, “I’m not allowed to take money. Internes can’t do that while they’re serving time at a hospital. If we took money, then the patient who couldn’t pay wouldn’t get the same care.” Despite excellent reviews, Paramount relinquished the literary rights to the Kildare stories, leaving them for its rival, MGM, to snap up. The MGM films that followed were equally inspirational in emphasizing that caring for patients trumped Scene from the 1939 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer production of The Secret of Dr. Kildare. Kildare, played by Lew Ayres (standing behind the patient with his arms crossed), is treating a young socialite with hysterical blindness. Reproduced with permission from the collections of the University of Michigan Center for the History of Medicine.