- Edmund Drummond: So at 9:15 this morning I rang for my nurse...
- Bock: Rang for your nurse?
- Edmund Drummond: To ensure one full hour of uninterrupted privacy.
- Bock: Of course.
- Edmund Drummond: I am the fool for Christ, and the Paraclete of Caborca, the Wrath of the Lamb, the Angel of the Bottomless Pit.
- Herbert Bock: 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?
- Mrs. Cushing: Dr. Spezio. I think one of your patients in here is dead, Dr. Spezio.
- Dr. Spezio: Why do you say that, Mrs. Cushing?
- Mrs. Cushing: Because he wouldn't give me his Blue Cross number, Dr. Spezio.
- Herbert Bock: You know, when I say impotent, I don't mean merely limp... When I say impotent, I mean I've lost even my desire to work. That's a hell of a lot more primal passion than sex. I've lost my reason for being - my purpose. The only thing I ever truly loved.
- Edmund Drummond: 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.
- Herbert Bock: It is all rubbish isn't it? I mean... transplants, antibodies. We manufacture genes. We can produce birth ectogenetically. We can practically clone people like carrots, and half the kids in this ghetto haven't even been inoculated for polio. We have established the most enormous medical... entity ever conceived, and people are sicker than ever. We cure nothing! We heal nothing! The whole goddamn wretched world, strangulating in front of our eyes.
- Barbara: We could really use you down there, you know there's a curiously high incidence of TB. You would be a doctor again, Herb. You would be necessary again. If you love me, I don't see what other choice you have?
- Herbert Bock: What do you mean if I love you? I raped you in a suicidal rage, how do we get to love and children all the sudden?
- Barbara: 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.
- Bock: A man comes into this hospital in perfect health, and in the space of one week, we chop out one kidney, damage another, reduce him to coma, and damn near kill him.
- Dr. Brubaker: Yes, sir.
- Bock: You know, Brubaker, last night I sat in my hotel room, reviewing the shambles of my life - and contemplating suicide. I said, "No, Bock. No, don't do it. You're a doctor, you're a healer. You're the Chief of Medicine at one of the great hospitals of the world. You are a necessary person. Your life is meaningful." Then I walk in here, today, and I find out that one of my doctors. was killed by a couple of nurses who mistook him for a patient; because, he screwed a technician from the Nephrology Lab.
- Dr. Brubaker: Hematology.
- Bock: And now you come to me with this gothic horror story in which the entire machinery of modern medicine has apparently conspired to destroy one lousy patient. Now, how am I to sustain my feeling of meaningfulness in the face of this?
- Dr. Brubaker: What about the girl? She says we have no legal right to stop her from taking her father out. She's willing to sign an AOR form.
- Bock: Let him go - before we kill him.
- Barbara: 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.
- Bock: 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.
- Barbara: All that's going on in there, Doctor, is a simple Apache prayer for my father's recovery. The markings he's made on my father's arms are from the pollen of the tule plant. The twigs have no significance, other than they've been struck by lightning and are consequently appeals to the spirit of lightning. It's all entirely harmless, Doctor. A religious ceremony, not a medical one.
- Bock: You don't seriously believe all that mumbo jumbo's gonna cure him?
- Barbara: On the other hand, it won't kill him, Doctor.
- Barbara: I fancied you from the first moment you came lumbering down that hallway, upstairs. I said to Mr. Blacktree, "Who's that hulking bear of a man?" Apaches are reverential about bears. Won't eat bear meat, never skin bears. Bears are thought of as both benign and evil, but very strong power. Men with bear power are highly respected and are said to be great healers. "That man," I said, "gets his power from the bear."
- Bock: Swell.
- 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.
- Bock: What do you say, Miss Drummond?
- Barbara: I expect you can call me Barbara... considering you ravished me three times last night... .
- Bock: Three times?
- Barbara: Oh, look at him pretending he didn't count. You were as puffed up as a toad about it. Punched a couple of holes in your crusade for universal impotence, didn't it? I think we're on first-name basis now.
- Barbara: 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.
- Bock: You and I better have a chat, Mrs. Christie, about your excessive use of float nurses.
- Mrs. Christie: I've got nearly a thousand nurses in this hospital.
- Bock: Every time one of them has her period, she disappears for three days. My doctors complain regularly they can't find the same nurse on the same floor two days in a row.
- Bock: 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.
- Dr. Einhorn: I see a man exhausted, emotionally drained, riddled with guilt, has been systematically stripping himself of wife, children, friends - isolating himself from the world. Are you impotent?
- Bock: Intermittently.
- Dr. Einhorn: What does that mean?
- Bock: It means I haven't tried in so long, I don't know.
- Bock: Get me Dr. Gillie. I want to talk to him right now. Put him on page, if you have to. I don't care if he's operating.
- Bock: He shrieked at me: "You old fink. You can't even get it up anymore." That was it, you see. That was his real revolution. It wasn't racism or the oppressed poor or the war in Vietnam. No. The ultimate American societal sickness was a limp dingus.
- Bock: My God. If there is a despised, misunderstood minority in this country it is us poor, impotent bastards. Well, I'm impotent and I'm proud of it. Impotence is beautiful, baby! Power to the impotent! Right on, baby!
- Edmund Drummond: 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.
- Black Panther: We reject the bourgeois, middle-class Black traitors and flunkies who are selling out the Black proletarian masses to the expansionist, racist policies of this hospital.
- Dr. Sundstrom: Do you want to take a couple of days off?
- Bock: No.
- Dr. Sundstrom: Go down to Montego Bay, get drunk, get laid, get a little sun?
- Bock: For God's sake, I'm 53 years old, with all the attendant fears. I just left my wife, after 24 years. A standard case of menopausal melancholy.
- Dr. Sundstrom: Maybe you wanna see Joe Einhorn.
- Bock: Don't wanna see a psychiatrist. Stop worrying about me. All I got to do is get my ass back to work, I'll be fine.
- Nurse Perez: This is the nuttiest thing I ever saw. Dr. Schaefer is in Room 806 dead.
- Nurse Reardon: What Dr. Schaefer? Our Dr. Schaefer?
- Nurse Perez: Our Dr. Schaefer. The one who's always grabbing everybody's ass.
- Dr. Brubaker: I've seen some pretty good snafus. But this one - there's a certain splendor to this one. One of the night nurses... thought Schaefer was a patient and plugged an IV into him. He was a diabetic, you know.
- Bock: What do you mean she plugged an IV into him?
- Dr. Brubaker: It's a really screwed-up story, Doc. You see, what happened was we had an old man in that bed who died last night. So the bed was available. You know Schaefer. He's Sammy Stud.
- Bock: So, he talked a nurse into zapping him on the bed?
- Dr. Brubaker: One of the girls from Hematology he's been running around with.
- Bock: God, it's a Roman farce!
- Milton Mead: For heaven's sake, William, you're gonna be in the hospital for two lousy days. What are you making such a fuss about?
- William Mead: You're supposed to be a big wheel around here.
- Milton Mead: There are no private rooms available. If they brought in Jesus Christ fresh off the cross, I couldn't get him a private room.
- Barbara: I don't want my father in this hospital. I had a dream about this hospital. I dreamt this enormous, starched, white-tile building suddenly erupted like a volcano, and all the patients, doctors, nurses, attendants, orderlies, the whole line-staff, food-service people, the aged, the lame, and you, right in the middle, were stampeding in one hideous, screaming, suicidal mass into the sea. I'm taking my father out of here and as quickly as I can.
- Bock: You're really a fruitcake, you know?
- Bock: I'll defrock those two cannibals. They will never again practice in this hospital. I'll tell you that.
- Mrs. Christie: Dr. Schaefer usurped that particular bed for his own purposes. Dr. Brubaker suggests it was for a love tryst and some weight is given that hypothesis by the fact that Dr. Schaefer was naked.
- Bock: What the hell is going around on? Every time I try to find somebody in this hospital, they either died of a heart attack in emergency or anesthesia shock in an Operating Room.
- Opening Narrator: The patient was in CO narcosis, and died at 7:30 that evening. I mention all this only to explain how the bed in Room 806 became available. The intern involved was a prickly young buck named Schaefer - who had a good thing going for him with a technician in the Hematology Lab. In the haphazard fashion of hospital romances, Dr. Schaefer had been zapping this girl on wheelchairs, stretchers, pantry shelves, in the kitchen, in the morgue, in the dark corners of corridors, standing up, sitting down. So you can imagine what an available bed meant to him.
- Mrs. Cushing: Where do you come off sending anyone up to Admitting without my okay?
- E.R. Nurse: Sally, would you get the hell out of here? The patient's in the holding room. You want his Blue Cross number,you go in and you get his Blue Cross number.
- Milton Mead: Marilyn, will you talk some sense into this lunatic?
- Marilyn Mead: You said it. He's a lunatic.
- William Mead: Big wheel! Can't even get me a private room.
- Milton Mead: I'll get you a tranquilizer.
- Bock: I'm sitting here boozing and you come in and tell me some demented story about your father's religious conversion.
- Barbara: You miss the point, Doctor. Not my father's conversion, mine. You see, I'd been hitting the acid pretty regularly at that time. I'd achieved a few minor sensory deformities, some suicidal despairs, but nothing as *wild* as fluency in an obscure Apache dialect. I mean, like, "Wow, man!" Here was living afflatus right before my eyes!
- Bock: You're wasting your time. I've been impotent for years.
- Barbara: Rubbish.
- Bock: What the hell is wrong with being impotent? Kids are more hung up on sex than the Victorians. I got a son, 23 years old. I threw him out of the house last year. Pietistic little humbug. He preached universal love, he despised everyone.
- Bock: [on the phone] Gillie? Bock. Listen, didn't you tell me a couple months ago you were gonna cut off all privileges for that assassin, Welbeck? Welbeck, yes! He just butchered another one of my patients!