Man.  Woman.  Birth.  Death.  Infinity.

Ben Casey. M. D. was a neurologist; the writers found another way to work with your head



Ben Casey, "Keep Out of Reach of Adults"
OB: March 11, 1964, 9 p.m. EST, ABC
I was two months old when this episode was first broadcast.


Man.  Woman.  Birth.  Death.  Infinity.

The five words at the top of this post, also opened every episode of Ben Casey, spoken by actor Sam Jaffee as a hand drew the representative symbols on a chalkboard.

This was a serious show, and it wanted you to know it.



The "cold open" of every episode, actually began with the chalk drawings, then a switch to that opening scene.  It usually involved that week's guest stars, setting up whatever problem (or hinting that there may be a problem) before the burst of the gurney through the hospital doors interrupted it for the dramatic opening credits.  We get the idea the stretcher is coming for one of those characters, and even get a patient's eye glimpse of the hallway ceiling lights flying by, to emphasize this series is as much about Dr. Casey's patients as the doctor himself.  The dramatic theme sounds like the orchestra is chasing the gurney down the hallway, and even the shots of the two main characters look like we're looking at them from a stretcher or bed.



Just the whole idea of good health, and taking it seriously, was the bedrock of this show.  It's a simple idea that drove some melodramatic, life or death plots.  No daytime soap material (at least not yet), no "disease of the week"; Casey was a neurologist, and many of these diagnoses actually repeated themselves over and over (brain tumors were popular, for instance).  And Casey himself took it all seriously, just as his cross-network rival, Dr. James Kildare, did.

Ben Casey premiered on ABC in the fall of 1961, the same time as Dr. Kildare on NBC.  Dr. Kildare was based on the character played in a very popular series of movies by Lew Ayres (and a character that also got his own radio show).  Both shows had a lot in common, in the reverence of their subject matter and the medical profession, their hunky doctors and the female audiences that watched them; and the fact the shows are always unfairly typed as nighttime soaps (until each series' final season, then guilty as charged). The two shows even came and went around the same time, paving the way for other medical shows to coincidentally follow in pairs (Medical Center and Marcus Welby, M.D.; ER and Chicago Hope; Grey's Anatomy and House, M.D.).

The NBC incarnation of Dr. Kildare featured a very young, seemingly gentle and timid Richard Chamberlain, playing Kildare as a polite, bookwormish, reserved (but very attractive to the ladies) type.  His older mentor, Dr. Leonard Gillespie, acted like a fatherly figure as played by Raymond Massey.




Ben Casey's title character, the chief resident of County Hospital, couldn't possibly be more opposite; Vince Edwards played him as a tough guy, a surly, alpha male, to hell with all the rules (except the medical code of ethics and sometimes even then) type, whose initial impression on most strangers is that they were likely about to somehow step on his last nerve. He was Steven Kiley without the motorcycle; Hawkeye Pierce without the wisecracks, egos or alcoholism; Gregory House without the cane, limp or misanthropy.  He was the grand marshal of the parade of edgy doctors who marched across our TV screens for the last 55 years.  A great A. V. Club article on the show quotes writer-director John Meredyth Lucas summing up the character: "“A gangster with street manners and moist Latin eyes in a doctor’s suit was magic.”  Indeed, Edwards, a B-movie tough guy, won the part based on his "bad boy" image.



And in a nod to his rival TV doctor's origins, Casey also had an older mentor, the hospital's chief of surgery Dr. David Zorba, played by Sam Jaffee.  ABC nixed the producers' idea to play him as Jewish (as networks, unfortunately, often did in those days) so the writers never addressed Zorba's religion or culture, but did give him some Jewish sounding lines and Jaffee played him that way anyway.  I suspect the talking lobster, Dr. Zoidberg on Futurama, is even partly modeled after Zorba.  Zorba may have been more experienced and understanding of Casey, but he never pretended to be his father.



The show had a cause and a reverence for the medical profession, but it wasn't a blind one.  For all of their support and their relationship, the traditional Zorba and progressive Casey fought at least once an episode but always from a level of mutual respect.

The show was created by James E. Moser, who started out writing for Dragnet and had already created the show that spawned all future medical dramas, the mid-1950s Medic.  While hanging out at L.A. County General hospital, he met Dr. Allan “Max” Warner, a brash surgeon who served as the inspiration for Ben Casey and Ben Casey.



Mary Ann Watson, whose book, "The Expanding Vista," explored President John F. Kennedy's relationship with and influence over 1960s television, describes the series (along with The Defenders and Naked City) as “New Frontier character dramas… programs based on liberal social themes in which the protagonists were professionals in service to society.”  Indeed, one of the most gripping episodes came as soon as the first season, when a smallpox outbreak results in the quarantine of the neurology ward.  The episode might play especially well even now if you were to substitute, say, anthrax for smallpox.  (Oh wait, ER did that already.)  The episode took a number of mini-dramas (emergency officials working with hospital administration, a compulsive gambler played by John Astin, a sailor kicking a door down to be with his dying, quarantined father) and wove them together beautifully like a more-exciting-than-usual tapestry.



The episode that aired the day after I was born, "The Only Place Where They Know My Name," was unavailable to me to review for this post...and that's a shame.  It featured comedian and singer Phil Harris (Jack Benny's former bandleader) in a rare dramatic role, and I would love to have seen that. (The episode involved a skid row bum, a prominent zoologist, and Casey making a tough ethical decision...and Harris did not play the zoologist.)  But I did binge-watch as many episodes from the 1963-64 season as I could, and one thing that jumped out at me (or at anyone else who ever binge-watches anything) is the formula.  By then they already had a formula mapped out--we meet the guest stars, find out how they'll interact with Ben Casey, he'll give them a prognosis, they'll ignore it, he'll insist to the point of coming out of the hospital to make his case (or showing some X-rays or both), some bad guy will develop, the person regrets not acting sooner and if it's not too late, acts on the advice, and the bad guy either turns around or gets his due, or perhaps turns around because he gets his due.  Having said that, sometimes it tosses that formula aside.

Another thing that jumped out at me, is that neurology isn't the only way the show looks at the human brain and nervous system.  Psychology is a very important part of the show, since it's as much about the human condition as about the medical condition of humans.  Daddy issues actually get a lot, I mean a lot of play in particular.  Evidently there was enough psychology on this show to fit into a second show, and that's exactly what happened this season: Ben Casey gave birth to a spinoff, Breaking Point, in which Paul Richard and Eduard Franz played a pair of psychiatrists.  In fact the season premiere of this Ben Casey season was the first of a two part crossover episode (possibly the first of that kind ever) that introduced the characters and continued as the first episode of Breaking Point.  Unfortunately, I only saw part one, the Ben Casey half, a tense character study in which a son taunts his father over a deep, dark family secret that involves their former life, 20 years earlier, in Nazi Germany.

"With the Rich and Mighty, Always a Little Patience" finds Anne Francis as a rich diva who's attracted to Casey when he fails to put up with her crap.  "If There were Dreams to Sell" centers on a little girl whose doting grandfather is dying and whose daddy issues are advancing.  "Little Drops of Water, Little Grains of Sand" is an especially well done episode about a temperamental man with a failing marriage, who turns out to be a victim of lead poisoning, after working in a poorly ventilated sanding hut.



"For a Just Man Falleth Seven Times" is a quirky little character drama directed by Vince Edwards himself, about a dying man who suddenly leaves the hospital and gets engaged to a pretty but lonely young barfly. She's played by Lee Grant, who turns in a great performance as a woman who finally feels appreciated, only to have to face the pending death of her future husband and the concern of his family and their attorney.  In a great piece of stunt casting, the man is played by none other than the original big-screen Dr. Kildare, Lew Ayres.  I'd like to think there was some attitude behind that casting decision.
Two episodes take on religion in various forms. "The Last Splintered Spoke of the Old Burlesque Wheel" is about a money-grabbing tent revival preacher who finds himself star-crossed with a reformed former stripper as she develops medical problems.  (Ironically that one actually aired on Christmas Day 1963.)  The season finale, "The Evidence of Things Not Seen," has two plots: one featuring Wilfred Hyde-White as a dying priest (the same year he'd appear in "My Fair Lady"), the other has Katherine Ross, later of "The Graduate" and "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," as a woman with a brain tumor, whose boyfriend, an atheist, gets beat up by her bigoted, religious father.  Both episodes make it clear, Ben himself is religious and a believer, but when his medical training and his religious beliefs intersect or collide, he won't throw his medical training under the bus and try to declare "a miracle" or "God's will."  In fact, Zorba even makes clear in another episode, when he uses the world "miracle," it's simply to describe something unexplained.

The one I finally chose was the March 11, 1964 episode "Keep Out of Reach of Adults," in which we get to see Casey in top form, self-righteously preaching on behalf of the medical profession while taking on some forms of alternative medicine.  In this case, it's some bizarre, new age treatment that involves lights, some kind of massage and what seems to be the power of suggestion.  Apparently the show wasn't quite willing to take on more acceptable alternative medicine like acupuncture or chiropractic medicine, but it's probably something that would be more common among the rich, even famous.



The show's open that week follows "Man.  Woman.  Birth.  Death.  Infinity." with "Silver skies, silent stars..." as a man performs the new age therapy mentioned above, on a Mrs. Hamilton, with a set of flashing lights illuminating the otherwise dark room.  "I suspect it's a radical neutron imbalance...don't let the big words frighten you. Just relax," he tells her. Then he says something that would get the attention of anyone my age or younger who knows the original "Star Wars" trilogy.  "The force is trying to help you now.  It wants to help you.  It's its only reason for existence."



The man is Professor Paul Hamilton (played by Richard Kiley) and the Mrs. Hamilton happens to be his wife, Gwen (Geraldine Brooks).  She says she feels better and trusts her husband, who thanks her for trying to "...trust a force we can't weigh or measure, or even understand."  (I suspect the "weigh or measure" line was a backhanded reference to the B.S. that makes up his profession.)   As he's called out of his office by his receptionist, Gwen looks out the window, then suddenly starts groaning and grabs her head.  She reaches for the table that holds the light device, but can't support herself and collapses (a nice metaphor, actually). And that's when the gurney bursts forth through the doors, cuing the theme music.



After the opening sponsor billboards, Mrs. Hamilton, posing under the pseudonym Margaret Cane, goes to get her test results from Ben Casey at County General.  He tells her she has an operable tumor, as long as she has surgery soon, but she says the medicine he prescribed her made her feel better, and wants to know if she can be treated as an outpatient.  But Casey tells her she needs an operation and needs it now, prompting her to acknowledge his now-infamous bedside manner by accusing him being "so cold" and "so right."  He admits he's no diplomat but says time is of the essence.

Her cover story to her husband is that she went shopping, not mentioning the hospital.  Right about the time Casey tries to track her down by her phony name, she has another episode in her husband's office, this time struggling to call Casey on the office phone, this time under her real name.



After a commercial break, she's in her husband's office again, going through his "pretty lights and fancy words" therapy again.  He locks the door to his office as he gives her a shot of morphine.  He tells her she just fainted; she comes clean and tells him she's been to see Casey twice, and tells him about the tumor diagnosis.  She says she was frightened and the pain was getting worse.  Paul Hamilton tells her he's not angry about "This Casey business" but reminds her that her own mother came to see her after the doctors had given up, and she lived two more years.

Casey himself shows up in the Hamilton Clinic office during this conversation to talk to Gwen, setting the stage for a dramatic argument and debate over their chosen methods.  Casey tells them, x-rays reveal she has a tumor in the fifth cranial nerve and reminds Gwen, it's operable now, but if it's not removed soon, she'll die. "I call that critical, what would you call it?" he says to Hamilton.



Hamilton says he doesn't agree with prognosis, or diagnosis, or suggested remedy; Casey reminds him he's not a doctor.  When Hamilton says he disagrees with "cutting" and instead prefers to "rely on the sanity of nature," he puts Casey on the soapbox for one of his greatest speeches ever.



Casey:  You are treating your wife, while time runs out for her, while her life hangs in the balance.  You are a quack, Mr. Hamilton, a charlatan!...You're treating the sick with mumbo jumbo, and an arsenal of dead cats and newt eyes.  Look at this place, it looks like an alchemist's cave in the middle ages.  Where's your pointed hat, Mr. Hamilton?  Or your jingling bells, or your sackful of specifics against the evil eye?

Hamilton says he's simply trying to give his wife two sides of the argument (which Casey says only has one side) and keeps referring to her "symptoms" as if the x-rays don't exist.  Hamilton, in the face of all of this, suggests something with amino acids or even that her tumor is "psychosomatic."  He puts doctors down for their salaries and claims "Doctors lose as many patients as they save."  He claims to have treated cancer while Casey claims Hamilton treated "stomach aches and skin irritations" with "ten cents worth of ointment."  When he tells Gwen if she doesn't have the operation she'll die...Gwen responds, 1960s style, by standing by her man.

Hamilton:  I meant what I said, Dr. Casey, there are many roads but only one goal.  
Casey: Well, keep that sentiment handy, it can double as an epitaph.


In a consultation with Zorba (that doubles as a political speech with a call to action),  Zorba agrees with all of Casey's findings and acknowledges the Hamiltons of the world suck, "preying on the gullible, the foolish, the ignorant," while "fattening their bank accounts."

"Unfortunately Ben, the laws governing the disposal of refuse and garbage, are written with greater care than those that control and limit the use of quasi-medical techniques and administrations...Society has the weapons to cut the heads off these parasites," he preaches.  In the meantime, Zorba says the decision still must be hers, and Casey still has a job and a lot of other sick people to worry about at County General.


Casey then meets with four of Professor Hamilton's former patients, who are current patients at County General, and even though they voice a few negative things ("He took my money," "I just wasn't getting any better") they ultimately back him up.  It's clear this manipulative talks with them worked their magic.

He tells his colleague, Dr. Maggie Graham (Bettye Ackerman) that he's failing to break Gwen's blind trust in her husband, and without better proof, his only choice is to let Gwen Hamilton die.  Maggie then uses the same ruse Gwen used in her first visit to Dr. Casey: showing up at the Hamilton Clinic, posing as a sexy nightclub singer named "Connie Allen" who started having pains after a high school reunion.  She says doctors scare her.



As Hamilton talks to her, in his clinic, he gets a butt goin'.  O.K., normally when we see something like this in an old TV show or movie, we just assume we were "that far gone," that it was O.K. for people in medicine to light up a cigarette in their offices.  But in this case, they've already established Paul Hamilton is a quack, so, just as the real-world surgeon general is calling for warnings on cigarette packs, this is being played as reinforcement that this is not a true man of medicine.



Hamilton makes her repeat three things, the third being."A sub-oxpital craniechtemy, and laminechtemy, were performed to increase pressure on the spinal cord."  (I'm sure I butchered the spelling on those, I'm not one of the nurses in our family.)

He then makes her repeat them again, very fast, prompting her to say "relieve" instead of "increase" pressure on the spinal cord.  This is where he apparently felt like he caught her.  He tells her he doesn't think he can help her and recommends she see a doctor.  "I imagine you know where to find one," he says tersely.  As she leaves, his receptionist hands him a call from a former patient, who's apparently spoken to Casey.


In lieu of the usual argument with Zorba, this time Casey gets a visit from an investigator with the county medical association, on a complaint filed on behalf of the Hamilton Clinic.  He reminds Casey it's always the patient's decision, which prompts Casey to shoot back, "Bat boys are coaching third base and the inmates are running the asylum," but the "quack" gets away with everything.  When he asks the investigator if he's just supposed to let her die, the investigator says "We have to be that tough on ourselves."  He says he's tried repeatedly to build a case against Hamilton but the laws have too many loopholes, and warns Casey if he contacts Gwen Hamilton again, his career will be in jeopardy.  This being a rule, you can guess how Ben Casey handles it.

Gwen comes into her husband's office while he's on the phone to Casey admitting his wife filed the complaint against him.  The look on her face indicates that's a complete surprise to her.  The whole final act is a showdown between her and her husband as she finally sees his motivations, especially when he complains that their nice home and club memberships are now at stake because of "one doctor's sick ego."   She also gets him to admit he was concerned about how it would look for his wife to get surgery while he's trying to run a clinic designed to convince people not to trust doctors.

"Is that what my life means to you?  A way to keep score in your fight with the AMA?" she demands. Hamilton reminds her of the terminally ill who visit him after the doctors give up,and he gives them hope.

"But what about people who come to see you before they see a doctor, who waste precious time, who buy words instead of medical attention?"  Gwen asks.  Paul simply accuses Casey of "using every trick in the book" to "hustle business."



The couple argument takes so long that Casey has time to arrive since that phone call that set it off.  When Paul says he's making more charges against Casey, Gwen finally breaks out of her Stepford shell, and declares, "You're not making any charges, unless you want to make them from a prison cell!"   Then to Casey: "I've been given hypodermic injections, doctor, by my husband."

Casey wants her to testify against her husband but instead, she thinks he deserves a second chance and is simply content to blackmail him into closing his clinic.  But instead, she has yet another episode, and Hamilton prepares a syringe of morphine.  However, she wants Paul to give it to her...and Casey to watch.
This is how the episode ends, with Gwen Hamilton passive-aggressively giving Ben Casey enough evidence to put her husband Paul out of business forever.

Paul: How can you use my love this way?
Gwen:  How can you use my pain?

And that's all we see.  We don't know if the blackmail or Casey's testimony does it, but we can presume Paul Hamilton closed his clinic and went into the car business; Gwen Hamilton had the surgery and separated from her husband; then perhaps she visited the psychiatrists on Breaking Point to work on her denial and co-dependency issues, as they perhaps explained his control issues to her and told her the definition of "projection."



Psychology plays a major and obvious role in character motivation on this show.  And the problems of one man's psychological makeup shook up the whole show.  That's another way of saying...Vince Edwards had a gambling problem and the show pretty much went to hell for it.  The other cast found Edwards' entourage so disruptive, but even moreso his long absences from the set, when he went to the track, and guest stars had to shoot entire scenes with stand-ins--that Sam Jaffee finally walked off the show, to be replaced by Franchot Tone.  (The voice saying "Man.  Woman.  Birth.  Death.  Infinity." changed from Jaffee's to Edwards' when that happened.)  In the final season, 1965-66, ABC retooled the show, making it more a nighttime soap, like their then-current hit Peyton Place.  We hadn't seen much of Casey's personal life up to that point (it was implied he was on-again off-again with Maggie Graham), but suddenly Stella Stevens was brought on to be his full time love interest.  And all of that resulted in plummeting ratings, and the show being cancelled.  (Over on NBC the same thing happened to Dr. Kildare to the point it even aired two half-hours a week like Peyton Place.)



The two series where never syndication mainstays; I remember them in late night syndicated reruns on a Huntsville, Alabama station in the 1970s, and they've popped up on and off on cable.  Dr. Kildare only recently saw an official DVD release of its first season, which is more than can be said of the long overdue Ben Casey.  In fact, for lack of a better term, a lot of those New Frontier, "do-gooder" shows (like The Defenders, whose DVD absence I'll complain about every chance I get) have been painfully slow to be remastered for new audiences, and that's a shame.  There's a lot of great writing, great drama, work from future acclaimed film directors like Sydney Pollack and Mark Rydell, and human/medical conditions that served as stand-ins for issues of the early 1960s.  I would think the shows would make some jaws drop 50 years later.  It shouldn't take a brain surgeon or neurologist to figure that out.

Availability: Three volumes of unofficial releases from ATI, with a smattering of episodes from the first four seasons.  As you can see from the stills in this post, the video quality isn't the best in the world, and there's no word if we'll ever see an official release.  We really should, though.  This one is way overdue.

Next time on this channel:  The Flintstones.