Tear Jerker / The Knick

In a series about early surgical procedures, you can expect these in spades.

Episodes:

• The first few minutes of the episode, and Series Establishing Moment. Thack and his mentor JR Christiansen are about to proudly present a new procedure to a large audience. And then the patient is wheeled in and we see ... it's a young pregnant woman. And she tearfully looks up at them and only says, "Please, save my baby."
• Then they dive in, and have to tear the woman's belly open to reach the baby. Then the baby isn't breathing when they extract it. Then the woman bleeds so much they've filled three bottles' worth. Then her pulse starts failing. And then she dies. And the baby's gone too. They promised that inside of one hundred seconds, they would have the baby out, the mother alive, and everything fine. Instead, the baby's dead, the sweet young mother is dead, and everyone in the room is on the verge of tears.
• Christiansen ends up so affected by the event that despite Thack's assurances to him, he goes into his office, lays down a white sheet, and shoots himself in the head. With wider context, it becomes apparent that he'd seen hundreds of procedures that ended like this. It wasn't this one thing that got him, it was that he'd seen so many just like this.
• In the third episode, they attempt a heart surgery and it fails. Bertie reflects that it was a shame they couldn't save him, and Thack lays out the sad truth about their surgery theater:

  Thack: He was doomed when he came in here. We were simply attempting to reverse his fate.

• In the same episode, we meet an ex of Thack's who's missing her nose. She explains that she lost it because of syphilis. And she got it because her husband cheated on her with someone from his office who had it, and then had sex with her and passed it on. So now she's a divorced young woman with a missing nose and a currently incurable sexual disease. Her chances of remarriage? Basically nil. Thack luckily has a procedure that's able to make her nose look functional again, but she's still facing an uphill battle, all because she was betrayed by someone she trusted.
• The Gallingers have the most wildly tragic plot in the whole series. Everett is an abrasive guy, but we see his wife Eleanor is very sweet, very supportive, very educated, and very dedicated to raising their baby Lilian and being a good wife and mother. The Knick UNDERSTANDS germ theory. They scrub up before and after surgery and understand that poor hygiene spreads disease. Gallinger scrubs up multiple times a day. But in an admittedly-pointless moment of facing off with Edwards, he picks up a clipboard from the bed of a patient with meningitis, and two fingers brush a wound and clip off a very small piece of dried blood, and it's the end of the day, where he has no further procedures. He could have done the same thing any other time of day and been fine, but instead he goes home and playfully pokes at his daughter's lips while holding her, and she's infected with a disease that kills full-grown men.
  • We then see the illness unfold over the next two episodes, and even see Lilian as her head swells up and she loses her sense of sight, sobbing all the while. They end up desperately resorting to bleeding her, an archaic treatment even for the time, and we see blood running down her leg. The next time we see her, it's as a corpse in their arms. Worst of all, Eleanor and Everett KNOW Everett was the one who made her sick - Sister Harriet deduced it fairly quickly.
    Eleanor: You brought this into our house!
  • And worst of all, Eleanor - seemingly incapable of continuing to direct her anger at Everett - seems to start blaming herself, and falling into denial, continuing to insist that Lilian is still alive and that she has to tend to her.
• The final episode is a doozy, but just for starters, Everett goes to visit his wife in the asylum. He sits down with her, she smiles at seeing him ... and all her teeth are gone!! The doctor - who is based on a real person, by the way - claims he did so to prevent a vector for further "brain infection," but it's as horrifying as it sounds. And while Eleanor isn't fully cogent anymore, she weeps a tear of fear at the sight of the doctor. She's been mauled, her beauty disfigured, and she's likely lost her trust in her husband permanently. And Everett has in all likelihood permanently lost the companionship of a nigh-perfect woman who would've been happy to support him in his career, talk good about him to her friends and family, raise his children with intelligence and warmth, understand his long hours, and stay with him forever. He won't understand for years just how much he's lost by losing her. If he had any sense he would've taken her out of that hospital immediately and never looked back. But it doesn't appear that he did.