"But a lot of science in medicine is trial and error. "The idea that some of us regard reacting to an illness as a battle against it… that implies that there are weapons to fight with, and I'll get better," Alda, now 87, and an advocate for science communication, told me in our interview. So where did that war language come from? And why did it seem like it was suddenly everywhere? How the shadow of war shaped languageĪlan Alda, the actor who played Hawkeye Pierce on television, says militaristic language in medicine persists partly because of our psychological need to see physicians as all-powerful gods. Certainly not in the way Hawkeye had been. In the ensuing weeks and months, I learned there were tens of thousands of people like me - healthcare workers who had been inspired to go into medicine because of Hawkeye's struggles in Korea, workers who, during the pandemic, found themselves on a very different kind of frontline.īut we weren't really at war, of course. After the piece was published by The Los Angeles Times, it went viral. That doctor was Captain Benjamin Franklin (Hawkeye) Pierce, the main character of one of the most beloved television series of all time: M*A*S*H, which celebrated its 50th anniversary in the fall of 2022. One hot, humid night in the summer of 2020, I sat at a dining room table in a rented cabin off the shores of Lake Winnipeg, and wrote a heartfelt pandemic cri de coeur about a fictional army doctor, one who taught me how we might make it through our COVID "war."
Ideas 53:59 War and Medicine: Hawkeye's Army
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