Hospital tumult as doctors seek out cures

HOSPITAL dramas are a staple of television entertainment. Mostly, they’re highly emotional, often involving some near Biblical miracle cure in which the blind see and helpless cripples rise joyfully from their wheelchairs.

At first, Charitè, the acclaimed six-part series on Netflix, seemed to be going the same way. The scene opens at the entrance to a large, church-run hospital in Berlin, circa 1900. It’s a gloomy shot, with the poor and the hopeless struggling to get help. We see a young woman, doubled over with extreme pain as she walks, unaided by the passersby, who are distracted from her situation by their own struggles with sickness and poverty. She makes it to the interior, where she finds chaos and bedlam.

Forced to queue by uncaring administrators, she nearly collapses until, at what seems to be the last moment, help arrives and she finds herself on a hospital gurney in the dismal care of the religious order that runs the institution.

Diagnosed with acute appendicitis, the patient demands the attention of a doctor, who she had known from a earlier point in her life. He is highly skilled and emotionally distant, yet carries out the dangerous surgery that is required. The patient lives, certain unsavoury aspects of the doctor’s former relationship with her are revealed and the drama seems well and truly set on the standard cliche-ridden narrative path. Except, to everyone’s great surprise, it isn’t.

We discover that the Charitè hospital is, in fact, a medical school facility in which the poor get free or subsidised care in return for guinea pig duties. It is on their troubled bodies that surgery techniques are explored and drug regimes tested, often with fatal results. It is hell in there, the hell being mostly the consequence of the historical period and the uncomfortable shift from prayer as a medical treatment to science.

So the real dramas begin as we meet the serious and sombre intellectual giants of the time, in the shape of Professor Robert Koch, who discovered the tuberculosis bacterium; Dr Erlich, who researched syphilis; and Dr Von Behring, the inventor of the cure for diphtheria. In reality, all three won Nobel Prizes; in the Netflix series we encounter the emotional and relational crises that beset them.

The big deal here is the quality of performance, direction and set design. These prevent the entry of cliché, despite the presence of several tortured love stories, not least of which is Professor Koch and his attraction to a very much younger cabaret singer, whom he ultimately marries.

And, oh yes, there’s Von Behring’s past relationship with his patient, his reliance on opium to cope with the pressures of existence, the anti-semitism that Dr Erlich is forced to endure, the already mentioned struggles between clerics and scientists, and the emotional torments of love between a medical student and a nurse.

In its own way, it is the latter that dominates.

The nurse is the povertystricken survivor of the appendix operation, who is required to work for no pay to compensate the hospital. She is successful in her duties and begins to attract the admiration of the staff.

At this point, the mores of the period re-enter the story: she wishes to enter medical school, but this is impossible for German women at that time.

However, don’t let me reveal every last aspect of the story. See the six-part series for yourself, in the splendid high-tech context of the advertisement-free Netflix right now.