"[...] Where doctors save lives and make love, often simultaneously.
Our stories, ripped from the headlines. Our passions, unbridled.
Our cafeteria, eh… Make love to me, Ann."
Our stories, ripped from the headlines. Our passions, unbridled.
Our cafeteria, eh… Make love to me, Ann."
— Jeff!Abed, Community, "Virtual Systems Analysis"
A series focusing on the practice of medicine in a hospital setting.
Provides an opportunity to educate the public on medical realities (e.g., initial misdiagnosis; correcting fallacies about well-known illnesses; the continued abysmal quality of hospital cafeterias).
Like the Police Procedural or Law Procedural, these are vehicles for short stories.
See also Artistic License – Biology, Artistic License – Medicine, Artistic License – Pharmacology, Death Tropes, I Need an Index by Monday, and Science Marches On.
Medical Drama tropes:
- AB Negative: This particular blood type is very rare when compared to the other blood types in the ABO system. In fiction, this can either be a source of drama if played realistically - as given its rarity, there aren't as many donors - or, for some reason, it's a blood type everyone seems to have.
- Afraid of Blood
- Afraid of Doctors
- Afraid of Needles: Trypanophobia, the fear of needles and injections, is a common fear many people have, or have had at some point in their life. For obvious reasons, it's a common sight in medical dramas the world over.
- After-Action Healing Drama
- As You Know
- Billy Needs an Organ
- Blood Transfusion Plot
- Clean, Pretty Childbirth: In fiction, babies are often born quickly, easily and with surprisingly little grossness, a far cry from real life, where things tend to be a lot more drawn out, tense and especially painful for the mother.
- CPR: Clean, Pretty, Reliable: In media, cardiopulmonary resuscitation is very clean (no broken ribs required!) and almost always works, and it might even be a chance for the show to throw in a bit of Fanservice for good measure.
- Code Silver: An armed and dangerous suspect storms the hospital and takes multiple members of the cast hostage.
- Confess in Confidence
- Contamination Situation: A main character is infected or affected by a dangerous pathogen or substance, and it's up to the other characters to find a way to either treat them or make sure other people aren't afflicted by whatever caused their condition.
- Convenient Coma: Whether played for drama or for other requirements, writers can get a lot of use out of making a character be unconscious.
- Crisis Point Hospital: In the aftermath of a disaster or disease outbreak of some sort, a hospital is at the forefront of the response, yet all is not well.
- Death by Childbirth
- Doctor's Disgraceful Demotion
- Dr. Jerk
- Easy Sex Change
- Flatline: Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep! Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep!
- Flatline Plotline
- Going Cold Turkey: A character tries to treat their addiction by completely removing whatever it is that they're addicted to all at once, rather than slowly reducing their reliance on it. This rarely ends well.
- Good Doc, Bad Doc
- Hollywood Science
- Hospital Gurney Scene: If you're a patient in a medical drama, you've got a pretty good chance of entering the story lying on a gurney or stretcher, giving other members of the cast an ideal opportunity to add exposition on how you got into the situation you're in now.
- Hospital Hottie: While in real life, a wide array of people in terms of conventional attractiveness can be found in medicine, medical dramas tend to select at least one or two particularly attractive people as part of the cast, if not have the entire cast be made up of this type of character.
- Hospital Paradiso: A doctor experiences, and is given the opportunity of working at a medical facility far more luxurious than the one they currently work at.
- Hospital Visit Hesitation
- Incurable Cough of Death
- Injection Plot
- Instant Drama, Just Add Tracheotomy
- Instant Emergency Response: Extremely convenient and always on time, characters in fiction can count on the police, fire brigade or paramedics to be with them in no time at all. This can be true in real life, but you typically have to be in the right place for this to happen.
- Instant Sedation: Like all drugs, sedatives need time to kick in, but in fiction, it’s as if a switch is flipped the moment the medicines are administered.
- The Intern
- It Never Gets Any Easier
- Kiss of Life
- Lethal Diagnosis
- Magical Antibiotics
- Magical Defibrillator
- No Control Group: For some reason, experiments and clinical trials in fiction seem to lack a control group who don’t get tested on, even though this would lead to inaccurate results in reality.
- Obscene OB-GYN: When the gynecologist or the urologist enjoys their work a little too much.
- Office Romance: Well, Hospital Romance.
- One Dose Fits All: Medicines typically need to be tailored to the person taking them; while over the counter medicine is easily categorised, prescribed or administered medicine is a bit more complex. In media, this caveat is often ignored - what works for one person will work for everyone else.
- One of Our Own
- The Patient Has Left the Building
- Patient of the Week
- Putting the "Medic" in Comedic
- Radiograph of Doom
- Roadside Surgery
- Ruptured Appendix: Thanks to Appendicitis being a pretty dangerous illness that the average person has a decent chance of experiencing due to sheer bad luck, having it happen in medical drama (as well as the even more dangerous situation where it bursts and releases bacteria into the peritoneal cavity) is a fairly common source of drama in media.
- Shot to the Heart: Where we’re going, we don’t need veins.
- Soap Opera Disease
- Special Aesop Victim
- Suck Out the Poison
- Surgeons Can Do Autopsies If They Want
- Taken Off Life Support
- Tap on the Head
- Televisually Transmitted Disease: Though extremely rare in real life, these illnesses are beloved by medical drama writers everywhere for adding a dash of tension or intrigue to the story.
- Urgent Medical Alert
- We Have to Get the Bullet Out!
- Worst Aid
- You Did Everything You Could
Examples of medical dramas:
- 2 Good 2 Be True (half the time, the female protagonist is a nurse)
- Abot-Kamay na Pangarap
- The African Doctor
- All Saints
- ANZAC Girls
- The Artful Dodger
- Becker
- Ben Casey
- Black Box
- Black Jack
- Call the Midwife
- CASUAL+Y
- Charite
- Chicago Hope
- Chicago Med
- Club der roten Bänder
- Code Black
- Combat Hospital
- A Country Practice
- Complications
- Dae Jang Geum (the second half following the Mid-Season Twist)
- Descendants of the Sun (half the time, the female protagonist is a doctor)
- Doc
- Doc Martin
- Doctor Strange (2016)
- Doctors
- The Doctors (soap opera)
- Doctor Kumahige
- Doctor X: Surgeon Michiko Daimon
- Doogie Howser, M.D.
- Dr. Chocolate
- Dr. Kildare (film series)
- Dr. Kildare (TV series)
- Dr Pat (one feature in an anthology series)
- Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman
- Emergency!
- Emergency Couple
- Emergency Ward 10
- Emily Owens, M.D.
- ER
- Everwood
- Faith
- The Flying Doctors
- Garth Marenghis Darkplace
- General Hospital
- Ghost Doctor
- A Gifted Man
- Good Doctor
- The Good Doctor
- GP
- Green Wing
- Grey's Anatomy
- Hart of Dixie
- Hawthorne
- Holby City
- Hospital Playlist
- House
- In Aller Freundschaft
- In Aller Freundschaft Die Jungen Aerzte — Spin-Off, set in a Teaching hospital, with some reappearing characters from the original series
- In Aller Freundschaft Die Krankenschwestern — Another Spin-Off,focused on the nurses
- Island Son
- Kamen Rider Ex-Aid
- The Knick
- LifeSigns: Surgical Unit
- Marcus Welby, M.D.
- M*A*S*H
- Medic
- Medical Center
- Medivac
- MedStar Duology
- Men in White — 1934 play, probably the Ur-Example
- Mercy
- Mercy Heights
- Mercy Street
- Miami Medical
- Monday Mornings
- Mystery Diagnosis
- New Amsterdam (2018)
- The Night Shift
- Nip/Tuck
- Nurse Jackie
- The Nurses
- Nurses (1991)
- Nurses (2020)
- Offspring
- Off the Map
- Open Heart (TV Show)
- Open Heart (Visual Novel)
- Painless
- Peak Practice
- Proof
- Providence
- Quincy, M.E.
- Ray the Animation
- Red Band Society
- The Resident
- RFDS (2021)
- The Royal
- Royal Pains
- Rush (2014)
- Scrubs
- Saijou no Meii
- Saving Hope
- Sex Sent Me to the E.R.
- Skymed
- St. Elsewhere
- Super Doctor K
- Team Medical Dragon
- This Is Going To Hurt
- Three Rivers
- Transplant
- Trapper John, M.D.
- Trauma Center (Atlus)
- Untold Stories of the E.R.
- Who is Julia?
