In 1938 Metro Goldwyn Mayer (MGM) acquired the rights to author Max Brand's creation, Dr. Kildare, and began a series of popular films about a young intern in a metropolitan hospital, and his struggle to learn his profession and earn the respect of a crusty senior doctor in his specialty, internal medicine. In 1961 the same characters, with different actors, made a nationwide success of the television adaptation of Dr. Kildare, becoming the forerunner of the many medical dramas, like ER and Chicago Hope, that lit up the small screen in the 1990s.

In the cinema version, Lew Ayres starred in the title role and Lionel Barrymore played the senior doctor, a sharp-tongued old curmudgeon with a heart of gold, which he tried to conceal. The first in the series, Young Dr. Kildare (1938), presented a cast of regular characters that included Nat Pendleton as the ambulance driver and...