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Everybody makes demands.

The nurses, patients, patients' family.

Anybody can handle that 12 hours a day.

And I go to sleep in my room and I lie down.

And I'm in my dream.

And somebody beeps me for Mr. Jones.

Why can't I have my privacy?

Why can't I eat my meal in peace?

I started always being available.

Constantly. Where Jack Morrison started was a little different than where he

wound up. Where he started was really the doctor I think all of us would like

to have. His feelings for the person that he was dealing with were deep. He

had great...

morals. His skills were questionable. He actually went to school in Mexico

because he couldn't make it in a school in the States. But that wasn't the

important thing to him about being a doctor.

Can you cover for me? I'm going to make a house call. A house call? Morrison,

house calls are obsolete like rotary engines.

The care that he brought to people was really the thing I think people

responded to.

I actually said I was never going to do television.

I was just going to do theater and movies.

And that's really what I thought my life was going to be. I hated television at

the time. I just thought it was corroding our whole society.

And two years later, after doing Inside Moves, I couldn't get a job.

And I wanted to make a deal with NBC, and they brought me out for that pilot

season. I got sent three scripts. They'd written the first six, something like

that, for St. Elsewhere. And I just thought these scripts are brilliant.

There's nothing like this. There's nothing like this in movies. There's

nothing like this in television.

I said, well, I'll go meet for this.

So I went and met for it, and I actually went and I met for the role that David

Burney played at that time.

I've got gonorrhea.

If I had played that role that David Burney played, it would have been very

different than the way I would do it, but I would imagine there still would

be...

a sensitivity to that character that probably wasn't written into that

character. In Morrison, it was written there. That's what he was. That's what

they wanted.

I've scheduled a liver scan for tomorrow morning.

And that will finally tell you what's wrong with me because I can't take any

more of this throwing up.

I know.

I hope tomorrow will know for sure.

So, you hang in there.

So I think it really was a combination of what they wrote and what I brought to

it.

I actually did a little bit of research. We all did, and there were some

hospitals that were very kind about letting us go and spend time in them.

There's a Harbor Hospital, which is down in Long Beach, which is a real busy

hospital. There was another smaller hospital that I went to which felt much

more personal because there was one doctor who basically ran the...

emergency room. This was a guy where there was an emergency last night that

totally overwhelmed their little emergency room department.

It was so dramatic. It was so moving, you know, to see this one man trying to

really save this life and call on everything they had and being ill

-equipped. And to me, that was Jack Morrison. That was the heart of St.

Elsewhere. Oh, come on, come on, come on, come on.

One more time, stand clear.

There was a kind of courage it took.

Maybe it wasn't courage at all. Maybe it was just young people making a show

wanted to go places they hadn't gone before and didn't know what it could get

them into.

Gene.

Gene?

What have we got here?

Oh, boy.

But they took on stories that had not been taken on.

You had Bruce Paltrow every week fighting for...

the integrity of the show for his writers, his cast, whatever, to step

into things and know what he was stepping into. Dr. Morrison, I pumped

your stomach last night.

Well, I just came by to see how you're doing.

In the first season, Tom Fontana and I, there was an episode that he wrote that

I thought was great, and it was one called Rain, and George Moore Fogan was

in it. And it was an episode that we actually talked.

quite a bit about because he had focused on my character a fair amount you know

these were guys they were really young and they had a fair amount of ego we

basically did our thing and they did their thing and they would come over and

say hi and chat and i i wouldn't say hi and i wouldn't chat i'd be off in the

rafters of some place preparing

which they never really seemed to understand.

But I just had to keep that whole thing in my head and be truthful, truthful,

truthful all the time.

He's under a lot of pressure. So are you.

And he's struggling to make ends meet. So are you. He has a baby.

So do you.

You're kidding.

Oh.

Yeah!

I really do not want it to be about me. I really want my loyalty to be to that

character. And my loyalty was to Jack Morrison over those six years. And

sometimes it was very hard because he became things that I did not feel he

started out being.

And at times it was hard to do that stuff.

It's what the writers wanted, and my job was to do it, and I did it.

I think in that first season, it probably was the closest to what I felt

that character ever should have been.

Now, I understand why lawyers have to defend guilty people and why doctors

have to treat terrible human beings.

But I've got to tell you something. The reasons aren't good enough.

Because in order for me to be a good doctor, I've got to separate my feelings

from myself.

And that scares the hell out of me.

Because if I don't know what I feel, I don't know what I believe in or who I

am. If I feel anything now, it's really a gratitude to be part of a show that

reached through that television into people's lives and inspired them

in a way that television, I don't think, really had done.

Because I know now, 20 years later, I still have doctors, people who were

sick, students, kids watching it with their parents.

They had things happen to them in front of that television set that had not

happened to them before.