M*A*S*H

Insubordinate, frequently irritating, cynical, totally human, and 100% caring—who could ask for a better doctor than Dr Benjamin Franklin Pierce?

I've always felt embarrassed that my medical hero is fictional. Be that as it may, I believe that M*A*S*H, the story of the 4077 Mobile Army Surgical Hospital during the Korean war, reached closer to the heart of what it means to be a doctor than any other work of art that I know.

You can taste M*A*S*H in three distinct flavours. There was the original novel by Dr Richard Hornberger, written under the pseudonym Richard Hooker while he was waiting to see patients in his clinic, and based on his experiences in Korea. There was the Oscar winning 1970 film directed by Robert Altman, starring Donald Sutherland as Hawkeye and Elliot Gould as Trapper John, released at the height of the Vietnam war, and oozing humour and wit as well as blood and bone. And there was the extraordinary television series starring Alan Alda, which ran for 251 episodes but which is still showing in an endless and justified cycle of repeats around the world.

I doubt if anyone realised quite what a hit the television show would be. Fox, which made the movie, still owned both the rights and the movie set, and so had a show that was cheap to make, initially at least. Larry Gelbart, who had visited Korea as a gag writer for Bob Hope, was recruited to write the script, but the only actor from the movie who was retained for the television series was Gary Burghoff, who played the wonderful Radar.

If you've never seen M*A*S*H, then names like Radar, Hot Lips, Trapper, BJ, Klinger, Henry Blake, Sherman Potter, Charles Emerson Winchester 3rd, Father Mulcahy, or the world's greatest psychiatrist—Sidney Freedman—will mean nothing to you. And you may be puzzled as to what possible relevance the world of blood and guts surgery in a field hospital at war might have to a rural Cambridgeshire general practitioner, whose surgical skills were only ever limited to the occasional sebaceous cyst.

But the great thing about all these people is that they cared. Hawkeye might have joked, womanised, drunk, teased, and argued—but, my God, how he cared. You could see it in the way that he cried, became angry and frustrated, and passionate.

Medical school didn't teach us much about caring. The lecturers taught us about glycogen storage diseases, immune deficiency, the Krebs Cycle, and the median nerve. They taught us how to care for patients, but rarely mentioned caring about them. And so as doctors we develop coping strategies that somehow get most of us through the days, but which leave others permanently damaged—either unable to show their patients that they care, or else dependent on inappropriate supports.

But when Hawkeye felt the pain of being a caring doctor it showed. It moved me then, it moves me now, and it still makes me laugh. What else could you ask for?