From Carry On to Casualty, House to Halloween II, fictional hospitals shine a healthy light on understaffing, overworking, malpractice and, yes, pandemics“I’m not going in there.
It’s full of sick people; I’ll catch something,” says an injured boxer admitted to hospital at the start of Carry On Nurse (1959).
It’s a gag that takes on an ominous topicality at a time when hospitals are perceived as such perilous places that even sick people have been trying to avoid them, and where inadequately protected hospital staff are as much at risk from the Covid-19 pandemic as their patients.It’s not supposed to be like this, according to decades of films and TV soaps in which doctors and nurses are more at risk of broken hearts than broken healthcare systems, and even these can be fixed.
George C Scott as Dr Bock in The Hospital (1971) is impotent,
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