It’s a strange phenomenon the medical drama because as a genre, it’s one of the most successful and popular types of show you can get. If you’ve got blood, guts and medical staff, chances are you’ve got yourself a hit series.

Emergency Ward 10

Since TV began there’s been show after show based in either hospitals or Doctor’s surgeries. One of the earliest of these to be shown on UK television was Emergency Ward 10 which first aired in 1957 and ran for ten years. Set in the fictitious Oxbridge General Hospital, the show focused on the lives and loves of the medical staff and the pressure of their work, as well as the patient’s stories, and it’s a format that was to provide the blueprint for hundreds of other shows.

Dr Finlay

Dr Finlay’s Casebook went on air in 1962 and was again a runaway success, in part thanks to the dashingly handsome actor who played the title role, Bill Simpson. He played Alan Finlay, a young medical student working in a rural practice in the Scottish village of Tannochbrae, under the guidance of Dr Cameron.

Dr Kildare

American audiences also loved a medical drama and in the early fifties, one of their most popular shows was Medic, which was a half-hour drama that starred Richard Boone as Doctor Konrad Snyder. This show paved the way for Dr Kildare, which was also hugely successful in the States.

Now of course we have literally dozens of medical dramas being shown on dozens of channels at any given time of the day or night. We have ER, Grey’s Anatomy, Casualty, House, Doctors, the list goes on and on, but a new breed of medical genre programming also emerged in the seventies and that was medical comedy.

It began here in the UK with the series Only When I Laugh which was based on a hospital ward where the characters never seemed any closer to being discharged. The main characters were Roy Figgis, Archie Glover and Norman Binns, all overseen by Doctor Thorpe who was played by Richard Wilson. Here’s a clip from the opening titles, just in case you’ve forgotten the show!

One of the best known and funniest TV comedies set in a hospital nowadays is of course Scrubs. It features the lives and loves of the medics and the acerbically sharp tongue of Dr Cox. Two of the central characters are Turk and JD, and here’s a clip of the two sharing guy love…

But getting back to serious medical dramas, and for me, America produces the best ones; ours pale by comparison. I suspect this is due to the drama factor given that Americans do intense dramas so much better than we stiff upper lippers do. Take for example scenes from Casualty’s A&E department and compare them with life or death scenarios on ER and the difference is clear.

While on Casualty someone may break into a slight trot if it’s really urgent and one of the Doctors may get a drop of blood on his pristine white coat, in ER when there’s a life and death situation, the medics will scream, sweat, cry, get showered in gore and fight each other to save the patient’s life. They’ll do so with guns firing, explosions shaking the department and with their own limbs hanging off, and that’s what makes OTT American medical shows so great.

Here’s a trailer for the season 14 finale of ER which demonstrates exactly what I mean…

Now let’s take a look at one of Casualty’s biggest shock storylines…

Now if that had happened in ER, instead of trotting to the scene sedately and then finding a bleeding nurse and shaking his head, Charlie would have been screaming for Chem 7, gases, full trauma panel and he’d have yelled “STAT!” while sticking his hand into the wound and holding her liver to stem the bleeding. It’s just, well, better!

The quality of American medical dramas is pretty much awesome across the board, though I do find House a little difficult to swallow as a scenario. One, I expect Hugh Laurie to start messing about and drop the American accent and two, can one hospital really get that many ‘odd’ cases and almost unheard of illnesses through its doors?

Grey’s Anatomy is another example of how well the Americans do the saving-lives-under-pressure medical drama but I think this one tends to focus more on the lives of the medics than the patients whereas ER has the balance between the two just right.

Maybe one of the reasons we love medical dramas so much is that we secretly all like to be able to say, “phew, thank god that’s not me” and also because we kind of like watching other people’s tragedies. It’s a form of voyeurism; you know the kind where if you’ve ever sat in an A&E department and an ambulance crew pull up outside, lights blaring and me-mahs going then they hoist someone on a stretcher out… well, you can’t help but wonder what’s up with that person and try to overhear. Or maybe that’s just me!

Let us know why you think medical dramas are so fascinating.