Yes, I know Lost is almost concluded; and here I am starting the first season. My only excuse is that I was waiting to make sure it would have a conclusion, before I got involved.
My favorite part of the show is Jack, one of the main characters, who is a surgeon. The writers seem a little confused about what kind of surgeon he is; in the first episode, he refers to having learned not to fear when dealing with a potentially catastrophic bleed during an operation on the cervical spine of a young woman. Characters who don’t like him refer to him as “the spine surgeon.” However, halfway through the season, his most serious conflict with his father, previously the chief of surgery at the same hospital Jack worked at, is revealed to be related to an incident in which his father operated while drunk on a young woman with abdominal trauma from a car accident, and Jack was forced to scrub in to help, but ultimately was unable to save the patient, due to an error his father had made. So I’m not completely sure what a spinal surgeon is doing as the pinch hitter in a trauma laparotomy; but he’s certainly very talented. Maybe he’s double boarded in general and neurosurgery. Or maybe he specializes in young female patients. . .
Apart from that, and the typical cluelessness about medical protocol (horribly incorrect CPR on multiple occasions; the OR is pitch dark; etc), this is only the second realistic TV portrayal of a doctor I’ve ever seen (the first was the murdered fiance, a cardiothoracic surgery resident, in the first season of Damages, and he was killed off, which I didn’t appreciate). And boy is it realistic. I can completely picture a doctor, and especially a surgeon, behaving exactly the way Jack does, with a hero complex obliging him to attempt to rescue every one, no matter what kind of disaster has occurred, and with a penchant for leadership which really holds the community together, although it also antagonizes some people. Also, most of his medical activities are fairly possible; supposing a plane to actually contain all the useful implement and drugs which he finds, the wilderness medicine he practices doesn’t seem too outlandish.
But the truest part is Jack’s perpetual flashbacks to medical tragedies which haunt him, and drive him on a perpetual mission not to lose another person for whom he feels responsible. I can’t believe the writers had any idea of how true this is, since even the medical dramas, with medical advisers, don’t capture it; but without being lost an a magical island, all doctors are haunted in this way, and this is the most vivid portrayal I have ever seen.
April 5, 2009 at 9:16 pm
I don’t watch Lost, but I TOTALLY hear you on the confusion over surgical specialties on television. Everytime we watch House now, we get SO ANNOYED, because one week, Chase is doing angio, and the next week, he’s doing transplant surgeries, and the next week, complex brain biopsies. And he looks like he’s all of about 25. It drives Jon and I crazy! He does get excited on Grey’s Anatomy, when he sees Callie using one of his products in surgery!
May 26, 2010 at 2:39 am
I believe in House, at least, having Chase doing scores of different types of surgery is just a bit of storytelling conceit on the part of the writers-they’ve blocked him in as “The Surgeon” and this way they can prevent having to introduce new characters constantly. If memory serves, for a while there they did use assorted bit-part actors as surgeons in the first season or two, especially when they were hitting things like neuro, but they seem to have eliminated that for the sake of expediency (and to make it easier to explain how House can yell at the surgeon or suddenly show up in the OR in scrubs and not have a turf war break out).