Ben Casey

If you are looking for the ultimate medical role model, then look no further. It's right here with Ben Casey. Dr. Casey is stalwart, resolute, ethical, courageous and above all clinically competent. He is everything a doctor should be. He's all business but he's compassionate too. Ben Casey is the greatest medical drama in the history of television broadcasting. All the other medical shows are in second place. One important reason for the show's excellence is the star of the show, Vincent Edwards. Mr. Edwards IS Ben Casey. Mr. Edwards took this character and made it into a television icon. He is to Ben Casey what William Shatner is to Star Trek. Both characters command respect, and earn it episode after episode. It's too bad that Dr. Casey and Captain Kirk never served together on the Starship Enterprise. THAT would have made for an interesting show.

Ben Casey is the chief neurosurgeon in County Hospital in a large city. He is surrounded by a well-trained staff of doctors and nurses. Each show focuses on a different aspect of life in the hospital. One show features Casey being sued for slander by an incompetent doctor. Casey is brilliant, but has an opinion about everything, so he stays in trouble with the front office.

Sam Jaffe stars as Dr. David Zorba, Caseys mentor and friend. Zorba advises him in important matters both as his superior, and his friend.

There are many guest stars seen over the years that this show ran. Jack Klugman, Brett Sommers, Franciot Tone, Ed Begley, Sr, Telly Savalas (with hair!) Cliff Robertson, Bruce Dern, just to name a few. The drama is well-told and engrossing.

Not everything is pure drama. One episode has Casey helping out one night in the emergency room dealing with crackpot people with imaginary problems.

Casey and Dr. Maggie Graham have an on-and-off relationship throughout the series.

If you get a chance to see Ben Casey, try to catch it with show #1, where Casey gets stuck with a needle after it was used in a test on a girl with rabies! You will be hooked.

Ben Casey was the greatest exemplar on TV of sixties confrontational characters. A dynamic professional above and beyond normal standards. If you were going to use him as a role model for your own career, you'd better be as brilliant as he was. You also have to have a brilliant mentor like Dr. Zorba who fully understands how brilliant you are and sees your career as virtually indispensable to the profession. I agree with the other member who compared him to Capt. Kirk. Kirk was in a more professionally secure place as captain of his own ship. If they served together, Ben might have physically intimidated him since he dominated scenes with such great actors as George C. Scott. Spock would have had a much better relationship with Casey than he did with McCoy. Neither of them suffered fools gladly. Casey would have known Vulcan, Klingon and Romulan physiology and psychology enough to impress Spock. Spock and Kirk would seek his advice on more than just medical matters.

Ben Casey and Dr. Kildare were exact contemporaries, both doctor shows that began and ended in the same season and were the most talked about shows on TV when they debuted in 1961. People were always making comparisons between them and here is mine.

One difference is that Casey was a resident, a full fledged doctor on staff at a hospital and a very prominent neurosurgeon. Kildare was an intern, a beginning doctor still learning the profession. If Kildare had been at the same hospital as Casey, Ben would have been bossing him around and making his life miserable.

A bigger difference was what they represented. Kildare was a symbol of the early 1960's. We were a very proud and optimistic country at that time. We'd survived the depression, won the war, had the communists on the defensive and were beginning to explore space. Social changes were taking place as well. if we were going to be the Greatest Country in the World, how could we have poverty and injustice? We tended to look at our government and institutions as benevolent servants of the people. There were several shows from this period, (Naked City, The Defenders, Mr. Novak were others), where handsome young idealistic novices entered a profession to be guided by their wise, patient but firm elders in becoming instruments of the system. The big challenge was getting people to trust the system by not committing crimes, studying hard and taking their pills. And of course, it's hard to look at the young men in these shows, (Richard Chamberlain, James Franciscus, Paul Burke, Robert Reed), and not see our youthful, idealistic president of the time, John Kennedy.

Casey was a precursor of the late 1960's. To him, the system was a monolith that existed for its own purposes and on its own momentum. You had to wrestle with it and with the mediocrity around you to get things done. Casey had a mentor as well, but Dr. Zorba often appeared to be more of a matador than a mentor, trying to tame Ben Casey, as he always called him, with a red cape and a sharp needle to puncture his ego from time to time.

I'd rather wake up from surgery and see Dr. Kildare's smiling face. But I'd be more likely to survive if it was Ben Casey who had done the surgery.

First, let me address one of the reviews, that said Ben Casey should be on DVD. I ordered my set, from Amazon in a DVD format and love each and every episode. Ben Casey was a show that I watched in my childhood and loved very much. His sardonic attitude towards his patients only made me love him more. I wish the writers' would have focused on his personal side, to give us more in depth view of who he really was.