The Hospital

"Now what in hell am I going to tell this boy Schaefer's parents? That a substitute nurse assassinated him because she couldn't tell the doctors from the patients on the floor? My God! The incompetence in this hospital is absolutely radiant... I mean, where do you train your nurses, Mrs. Christie, Dachau!?"

"You're greedy, unfeeling, inept, indifferent, self-inflating, and unconscionably profitable. Besides that, I have nothing against you. I'm sure you play a hell of a game of golf."

"We've got a 23-year-old boy. I threw him out of the house last year. A shaggy-haired Maoist. I don't know where he is. Presumably, building bombs in basements as an expression of universal brotherhood."

"I'm middle class. Among us middle class, love doesn't triumph over all - responsibility does."

"Within a week, my father had closed his Beacon Hill practice and set out to start a mission in the Mexican Mountains. I turned in my SDS card and my crash helmet, and I followed him. It was a disaster, at least for me. My father had received the revelation, not I. He stood gaunt on a mountain slope and preached the Apocalypse to solemnly amused Indians. I masturbated a great deal. We lived in a grass wickiup, ate raw rabbit and crushed piñon nuts. It was hideous. Within two months, I was back in Boston. A hollow shell, disenchanted with everything, and dizzy with dengue. I turned to austerity, combed my hair tight, entered nursing school. I became haggard, driven - had shamelessly incestuous dreams about my father. I took up with some of the senior staff there. One of them a portly psychiatrist, explained I was generated by an unresolved lust for my father. I cracked up. One day, they found me walking to work naked and screaming obscenities. There was talk of institutionalizing me. So I packed a bag and went back to join my father in the Sierra Madre Mountains. I've been there ever since. That's three years. My father is, of course, as mad as a hatter. I watch over him, and have been curiously content. You see, Doctor, I believe in everything."

"Mr. Blacktree disapproves of my miniskirt, the only thing I had to come to the city with. Back at the tribe, I wear ankle-length buckskin."

"You're a very tired, very damaged man. You've had a hideous marriage, I assume a few tacky affairs along the way. You're understandably reluctant to get involved again. On top of that, here I am with this preposterous idea you throw everything up and go off with me to some barren mountains in Mexico. Utterly mad, I know. On the other hand, you obviously find this world as desolate as I do. You did try to kill yourself last night. So that's it, Herb. Either me and the mountains or - a bottle of potassium."

"This is Dr. Ives. He's in the Nephrology Lab. I was in there a little while ago, and he was suddenly taken ill, and I thought I'd better get him over here right away. He had at that time perhaps an hour to live. Prompt treatment would have saved his life. As a staff doctor, he was seen without preliminaries... His vital signs were taken, an electrocardiogram... which revealed occasional ventricular premature contractions. An intern took his history... and then he was promptly... simply... forgotten to death."

"I am the fool for Christ, and Paraclete of Caborca."

"Mislaid. Mislaid among the broken wrists, the chest pains, the scalp lacerations, the man whose fingers were crushed in a taxi door, the infant with a skin rash, the child swiped by a car, the old lady mugged in the subway, the derelict beaten by sailors, the teenage suicide, the paranoids, drunks, asthmatics, the rapes, the septic abortions, the overdosed addicts, the fractures, infarcts, hemorrhages, concussions, boils, abrasions, the colonic cancers, the cardiac arrests - the whole wounded madhouse of our times."

"Mrs. Cushing: Dr. Spezio, may I see you for a moment, Doctor, if you don't mind? Doctor is this your handwriting, if you don't mind? Am I supposed to read this? Was that a sprain? Was that a broken wrist? I can't read that scribbling. I mean I have to bill these people. I know you doctors are the ministering angels and I'm the bitch from the accounting department, but I've a job to do too. I mean, if you don't mind, Doctor."

"Behind the lab coat beats the heart of a man who's been pushed to the edge."

"Madness, Murder and Malpractice."

"Watch them operate!"

"I may be crazy, but I think I've operated on the wrong patient."

"George C. Scott - Dr. Herbert "Herb" Bock"

"Diana Rigg - Miss Barbara Drummond"

"Robert Walden - Dr. Brubaker"

"Barnard Hughes - Edmund Drummond (and an uncredited role as Dr. Mallory, the OB/GYN who discovers he's got the wrong patient.)"

"Richard A. Dysart - Dr. Welbeck"

"Stephen Elliott - Dr. John Sundstrom"

"Andrew Duncan - William "Willie" Mead"

"Donald Harron - Dr. Milton Mead"

"Nancy Marchand - Mrs. Christie, Head of Nurses"

"Jordan Charney - Hitchcock, Hospital Administration"

"Roberts Blossom - Guernsey"

"Lenny Baker - Dr. Howard Schaefer"

"Richard Hamilton - Dr. Ronald Casey"

"Arthur Junaluska - Mr. Blacktree"

"Kate Harrington - Nurse Dunne"

"Katherine Helmond - Mrs. Marilyn Mead"

"David Hooks - Dr. Joe Einhorn"

"Frances Sternhagen - Mrs. Sally Cushing"

"Stockard Channing - E.R. Nurse"