While visting family with cable, I happened to catch most of an episode of
Quincy, M.E. that first ran Thursday October 26, 1978. Titled
"Death By Good Intention", this is the basic plot from the
Jack Klugman series:
A patient dies just hours after having had a successful surgical operation. An `Affirmative Action' doctor is suspended because of his `mistake' and a friend of Quincy's decides that he will take the blame to save him, and the `Affirmative Action' program. Quincy soon gets involved to try and save his friends job.
(more)
Why bring up ancient history? Well, watching this show really brought home to me how the political landscape has shifted. This show is a real time capsule of how affirmative action was faring, back when it was something that might still be taken seriously, rather than the thoroughly discredited and ineffective Liberal pipe dream we all know it is today. (snark)
Seriously though, it was an attempt to look at affirmative action, albeit in a very over-dramatized style bound by the cliches of the time. (1978) To recap the plot
(spoiler warning), a young black medical resident doing a stint in an ER initially has trouble treating an injured indigent patient; the patient starts bleeding and it's brought under control with help - then when the patient seems stabilized, he later suffers a second bout of bleeding and dies. Quincy gets involved because the resident's mentor is an old professor of his whom he greatly admires - he also happens to be black and head of the affirmative action program at the hospital.
Complications ensue. The white administrator suspends the resident; headlines in the paper read "Affirmative Action Doctor Kills Indigent" - and then Quincy digs deeper to save the day.
Along the way, all of the cliches are brought up. There's the charge the resident was only there because he was black, not because he was qualified. The hospital administrator doesn't like affirmative action but has no choice because of a recent court decision (back then the government was actually trying to push Affirmative Action!) - but you can't hate him because he doesn't like it because nobody helped him and his 8 brothers and sisters. He made it all on his own without any special help. That, and he's thinking of the hospital which is the only health care option for a lot of people.
The black members of the staff meet and discuss what action to take. There's talk of picketing, etc. The indigent's only living relative, who had not seen him for 15 years, gets a lawyer and is going to sue the hospital to cash in. Quincy's friend decides to resign and take the blame to save the program. He tells Quincy there's just no way he can understand what it's like for him. Quincy makes a statement that when he looks at him, he doesn't see a black doctor - he just sees the finest doctor he's ever known. And so on.
Eventually, Quincy determines that the patient was killed by a nurse who had quietly been killing patients for years - but "only because they were going to die anyway, and there were more deserving patients who needed the bed space they were taking up." Except for her, everyone else gets everything sorted out; the administrator takes back Quincy's friend, and the young black resident gets the only thing he wanted - a fair chance just like any other doctor.
To watch this is to see how much America has changed since then - and how much it hasn't. There's no way a show could be made like that today. For one thing, it looked like they rounded up every black actor in Hollywood who could look like a stereotypical professional - if black.
For another, the only asian medical cast member was Quincy's assistant, Sam Fujiyama. (Robert Ito) In my (limited) experience with the medical profession these days, there seems to be a much larger percentage of "international medical graduates" around today, and nowhere near as many blacks as this show had. Perhaps that in itself says something about the way affirmative action worked out? I don't recall seeing too many women physicians of any color in the show either.
Then again, this show is an example of the kind of stereotypical liberal bias Hollywood is accused of - and it's not easy to deny in this case. There are no real villains in this episode. Everyone is acting for what they think are good motives, even the one we find is the real villain. At worst, they're just mistaken. The closest thing to a bad person is the indigent's relative - and they never appear on screen. If you want to argue that liberals are wimps and idiots who don't understand the real world, well then this could make your case - if you ignore the fact that this is all dramatized fiction. The question is, is this what people think liberals are like today?
Finally, one thing hasn't changed. Poor people still have a tough time getting good health care, and the hospital in show would probably be even more burdened by indigents today - unless it had been bought out by one of the big health care mega corps. There'd probably be a lot more paperwork in the story, and discussions about insurance or lack.
Like so much television entertainment, Quincy was a fantasy. It's a cultural artifact not objective history - but it still can inform. You look at the ideals on display in this show, and you just have to shake your head and say "What happened?"