Dr. Oz: ER Was My Other Med School

NBCU Photo Bank / AP Photo As George Clooney, Noah Wyle, and Julianna Margulies return to County General one last time, best-selling author Dr. Mehmet Oz examines the show’s impact on viewers—and patients.

The drama of working as a trainee in an emergency room wore off after a few years and slipped into the crevices of my brain’s hippocampus with all the other sordid memories of my formative years, until my college roommate, Billy Campbell, called six years later. He had graduated from Harvard Business School and then was hired to work in Hollywood at Warner Bros. And he was reaching out to share a script he had just received about a show that seemed so real it reminded him of the raw emotion evident in people desperate enough to seek out an inner-city emergency room. In fact, author Michael Crichton, who had written the work 20 years earlier, was a graduate of my program. The pilot was entitled ER.

The characters were so intimately known by Americans that our own patients sometimes would try to pigeonhole us into the personalities of the ER characters.

I entered surgical internship during the blistering summer of 1986 in Washington Heights in Northern Manhattan. We broke the record for homicides in New York City that year (we had more than 2,000). And I opened a chest nearly every day in the emergency room. Billy would hang out with me, which speaks to his personality since few of us want to be in an E.R. until we need to be in one. Yet his macabre interest presaged a similar curiosity of millions of Americans. His only credential was his ability to follow directions, so Billy would act as an orderly (we desperately needed the help anyway). He spoke to an alcoholic and kept him in the air-conditioned waiting room until I could help him detox. With his charming Southern accent, he calmed a combative patient so I didn’t need to administer a sedative as I treated the broken bone. He also handed me instruments as I sewed up the face of a beautiful Latina woman whose boyfriend had slashed her face at the base of the George Washington Bridge.

So when Billy sent me the ER pilot, I loved the authentic and unfiltered plot. The show captured the ups and downs of touching another person’s life during those moments when we filter out all the b.s. and experience unadulterated life because nothing else matters more. Billy and Warner Bros. agreed and gave birth to the landmark series that would run on NBC for 15 years, changing the lives of its stars and creators.

The show also changed the lives of many Americans by exposing them to the lives of their fellow humans in extreme circumstances. It is not the disease, but the person with the disease that ultimately draws our compassion. Who didn’t see some part of themselves in the harried, worried faces of the strangers that found themselves in the E.R. each week—the mothers going into childbirth, the patients with unexplained symptoms, the accident victims? In their stories, we see ourselves coping with conflicts that we did not viscerally realize existed until we tuned in at 10 p.m. on Thursday nights.