One of the shows that I watched fairly faithfully in the 1960s (although I don’t rank it as one of my top ten) was Dr. Kildare. 

It’s the show that made Richard Chamberlain famous as the title character and I guess it was the last big role for Raymond Massey as his mentor.

Although I recall enjoying it, none of the episodes made a lasting impression on me the way that some of The Defenders episodes did. 

In fact, about all that I can recall is an episode that dealt with sickle cell anemia and a doctor who was trying to find a cure for it. The patient in that episode was a Black woman, but I don’t think I realized at the time that that was a disease that was transmitted genetically, and it primarily affects Black people.

There was another episode, a comedy I guess, featuring Jan Murray, and all I recall about that one is he had a line of dialogue that went something like (he was pretending to be a surgeon), “Clamps, scalpel, tissue. [He pronounced it broadly, like “tiss-you”.] Tissue? I barely even know you.”

And one more in the final season, I think, where it had transmogrified into a quasi-soap opera due to the success of Peyton Place and was now on twice a week for a half hour at a time. Diane Baker was the guest star and she tried to seduce young Dr. Kildare by offering him her body, but I no longer recall in exchange for what. Hmm, do you think she and Dr. Kildare had an affair, and she got pregnant and gave birth to Gregory House? Food for thought.

Times were different then, and TV hospital shows were different. Prescriptions were called Rx’s, not scripts, for example.

TV doctors had different priorities, as this series of scenes from the first episode will make clear.

I’ve recently watched the first three episodes of the first season, and the second episode was pretty good, where Dr. Kildare tries to prevent an outbreak of smallpox.

In the third episode, Suzanne Pleshette, one of my favorites, played a young woman who was dying of leukemia, but the doctors wouldn’t tell her what she was suffering from; they’d only tell members of her family. 

That was actually a thing back in the 60s. I remember when my grandfather went into the hospital with a tumor in his intestines, he was not told the extent of the problem, only the family was told (but I think he figured it out; whether someone told him [Mark, perhaps?] or whether he sussed it out on his own, I don’t know). In his case, the tumor was removed and he lived another 20+ years.