Can Art Teach?

Illustration by Kyle Ellingson Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story Another patient has hit the emergency room, this one with a malfunctioning pacemaker. As doctors begin the complex process of inserting a wire into his chest, a question-and-answer session begins. “Why do we inflate the balloon now?” one asks. A student doctor answers, “So it’ll float into the right ventricle.” The operation is a success, but the doctors are pulled away immediately—first to a patient who needs to be told about her high mercury level, then to a person who just nearly drowned. We’re midway into the first season of HBO’s medical drama “The Pitt,” and though we may not learn how to perform a heart procedure, we do get another lesson. As Dr. Langdon, one of the senior residents, remarks to his colleague, “The average emergency doctor gets pulled from task A to task B every three to five minutes.”

“The Pitt” is filled with moments like this—pinpricks of education in which the natural speech of a character warps as the script bends to convey a message. We learn about how the shortage of nurses limits hospital-bed space; the rate at which patients assault nurses; the fact that the space of Retzius (a part of the pelvis) is named after a nineteenth-century professor of Swedish anatomy. Highly earnest—sometimes even maudlin—the show is a throwback to the serial medical dramas that were omnipresent in the nineties and twenty-tens. Noah Wyle, who plays the show’s protagonist, Dr. Robinavitch, is to some degree reprising his role as a doctor on “E.R.”

Shows like that one very often embedded neat social messages within the kernels of patients’ case histories, but “The Pitt,” more than any of its forerunners, projects its conscience plainly on the screen. Each season unfolds in the course of a single day, thus concentrating all the hospital’s lessons into a tight timeframe. When an anti-vaccine parent refuses to let her son have a spinal tap, there is little question that she is in the wrong. When ICE agents show up at the hospital with a woman whom they have detained, there is little ambiguity that these are very bad guys. Beyond these overt displays, show’s lessons are many: the urgency of providing the right care, the mental and emotional toll that medical work can take, and the politics outside the operating room that hamper doctors’ efforts. The show is incredibly popular and widely lauded; last year, it was nominated for thirteen Emmys and won five, including for Outstanding Drama. It is also, at its core, an exponent of an unpopular form: didactic art.