Can Art Teach, and Should It Try?

"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."

""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."

"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"

A medical drama shows emergency procedures while embedding frequent question-and-answer teaching moments. During a pacemaker insertion, doctors and student doctors explain why steps are taken, and the operation succeeds even as staff are repeatedly pulled away to handle other urgent needs. The show also conveys lessons about hospital operations and staffing, including how nurse shortages reduce bed space and how patient assaults affect nurses. It includes anatomical trivia, such as naming a pelvic space after a nineteenth-century Swedish anatomy professor. The series presents its social conscience more directly than earlier medical dramas, using earnest dialogue and structured case situations to deliver information.

Read at The New Yorker