“The Pitt” and Us
- marketingc8
- 3 days ago
- 3 min read
Medical dramas on television have come a long way since “Dr. Kildare” debuted in 1961, although that show was much more cutting-edge than you might think. But count us among the fans of “The Pitt,” which wrapped up its first season in April on MAX.
Set in an emergency room at a hospital in Pittsburgh, the show was viewed by more than 10 million viewers per episode. It stars Noah Wylie, who also played a principal role in the long-running series “ER,” which ran on television for 15 years. The first season of “The Pitt” included 15 episodes, each one covering an hour in an emergency room’s day that just happened to be the first day for a group of students and interns, too.
But “The Pitt” is also winning praise for its stark reality about the overcrowding in big-city hospitals, the veracity of its medical details, and the pressure-cooker of the medical center itself as a functioning business entity that grapples with issues around pay and working conditions for all involved.
“The Pitt” is gripping. One wag on social media said he was so sad the series was over that he was heading down to his local hospital to observe and get a fix of fresh drama. Another said she had observed enough intubations on “The Pitt” that she felt trained to perform the procedure by herself.
But we’re here to celebrate its unflinching approach to human anatomy. After all, we take our anatomy for granted 99% of the time. And “The Pitt” doesn’t back away. There’s a triathlete with lung issues. There’s a four-year-old boy who accidentally ingests one of his father’s weed gummies. There are tense decisions over end-of-life care and how much intervention to take. There’s sickle cell disease and there’s a teenage boy who is brain dead after overdosing on Xanax laced with fentanyl. There’s a man who gets shot in the chest with a nail gun—and so on.
There are accidents, of course, and then there are also self-inflicted issues like the parents of a patient who fight over whether to allow a spinal tap for their child. And there’s a compelling sequence where a parent pulls out a phone to compare information she can glean online with what Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch (that’s Noah Wylie) is recommending.
And then come the brutal last few episodes as doctors and nurses grapple with a mass shooting and treat over a hundred patients in rapid succession, losing a few in the process.
But we watched in sheer admiration as the doctors, nurses, aides, students, and interns are spoke in great detail (and quickly) about the human body and how it works. Of course they are all actors, but collectively they represent one hospital’s staff of experts in the human body and we think of all years of study and understanding that goes into grasping the details of the body’s myriad, complex functions.
Even during a crisis as every second counts, it’s the communication among these professionals—initialing discussing possibilities, challenging each other with questions about the hypotheses they float, and settling around an agreed-upon approach for treatment. (Well, usually. There are disagreements, of course.)
We think of the classes and training and labs that all these professionals went through and we think of all the science they learned to grasp key concepts around what kind of medicines and painkillers to prescribe, what kind of surgeries to perform, and so on. And we hope that you appreciate (as we did) how all that training makes them capable of managing life-threatening situations.
Should those of us who are not interested in a career in medicine learn more about how our bodies function? Of course we believe the answer to that question is a resounding “yes.”
But it’s not happening. A 2020 survey of 2,000 Americans found that nearly 30 percent of us didn’t know the difference between a liver and a kidney.
“We have so much going on in our lives, we sometimes forget that our health should come first and for a lot of us, our high school anatomy classes were ages ago,” said Dr. Rob Sinnott, Chief Science Officer for USANA, the organization that conducted the poll.
Yes. Right.
Here’s to the experts in places like “The Pitt.” Right there when we need them.
And understanding how our bodies work.
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