St. Elsewhere

I was born in the time of disco and grew up in the Cold War era. I studied a new-fangled technology called "DNA Fingerprinting" in high school and remember when smoking on airplanes was de rigeur. Life has changed very rapidly during my generation. I'm not waxing poetic, I'm simply stating the truth- I didn't grow up with a cell phone, caller ID, or CDs. All those came long after I was legally allowed to smoke my first cigarette at 16. (There was a designated smoking section at my high school and it wasn't behind the bleachers.)



I'm sure most of the current pre-meds in college have never bought a cassette tape at a record store, needed to find a pay phone, or even worse, needed to use a pay phone, but didn't have a dime. So the idea of not smoking in a hospital, not using gloves for every exam, and not having a digital thermometer are very foreign concepts. Want to see how it was done in my day and age? Watch St. Elsewhere.

If you've seen House, Grey's Anatomy, ER, or Chicago Hope, you've seen St. Elsewhere. Except you haven't seen the nurses wearing those ridiculous paper hats, an EKG machine using blurry green dot LED displays, or minorities being more scarce than a parking spot on the first day of class. I was watching St. Elsewhere for the upteenth time the other day (don't judge, I love watching shows that I've seen a thousand times before), and you know what stood out most to me? Not the fear of the bare-handed phlebotomist getting HIV, or the nurse demurely answering "Yes Doctor" whenever someone barked at her, it was the lack of a computer for patient records. They were reading off these ultra-thin, flimsy parchments called "folders" filled with "paper", where you could just write on them, as if they were an iPad. Very weird.

If you have a spare couple of hours, watch some episodes of St. Elsewhere. In spite of the dated decor, it's very well-acted, replete with lots of faces you've seen before. Denzel Washington, Ed Begley Jr., Christina Pickles (Ross and Monica's mom), Howie Mandel, Marc Harmon, David Morse (Tritter on House) and even William Daniels for you 90's youngsters (Feeny on Boy Meets World). The extras were even awesome- Ray Liotta, Jane Kaczmarek, Helen Hunt, Tim Robbins, the list goes on. You'll appreciate how much time has changed in one generation.