Mercy Street
Oct. 28th, 2019 08:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerI’ve been researching the Civil War in a low-key way for a while now, so when I discovered Mercy Street, a PBS TV series set at a hospital in Union-occupied Alexandria, Virginia during the Civil War, of course I had to watch it - especially once I discovered that three episodes in the first six-episode season were directed by women.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t terribly impressed. It didn’t help matters that last year I read Pamela S. Toler’s Heroines of Mercy Street, a nonfiction book that was published as a series tie-in (although the book is more well-researched and in depth than you might expect from a tie-in), because that background made it even more obvious where the filmmakers had sensationalized things - and also made that sensationalization more frustrating, because they had plenty of drama already at their fingertips if they had just trusted their material.
Basically, the showrunners decided that they needed to have not one, not two, but three villains: a doctor, a nurse, and a hospital steward, united in their singular focus on personal gain, indifferent to the well-being of the patients.
I’ll grant them the hospital steward. Many of the hospital stewards really do seem to have been grasping men, lining their pockets by selling supplies on the side even though that means the wounded men in their care go hungry and sometimes die because they can’t recover without proper nutrition. However, one villain would have been enough - especially because the bad doctor and nurse could have produced much more interested and varied conflict in the narrative if they had been less one-dimensional.
So, of instance, the army surgeon character is not merely devoted to outdated medical theories (which seems to have been common among army surgeons, and caused friction with civilian contractors), but also a venal, grasping toady who is utterly indifferent to the well-being of his patients. But wouldn’t it be more interesting (and more informative about nineteenth-century medical theory!) if the army surgeon and the civilian contractor both sincerely cared about their patients, and their conflict really did center around the differences of their medical opinions?
Similarly, the show could have gotten plenty of conflict from two well-meaning nurses, one of whom served under Florence Nightingale in the Crimea - yet finds herself subordinate to a nurse with no formal training and comparatively little experience, who nonetheless was appointed head nurse by Dorothea Dix. Instead, it turns the first nurse into a secret tippler who is having an illicit affair with the evil army surgeon.
I found this last particularly annoying, because this nurse character shares a name and backstory with a real person, Anne Hastings. But otherwise the character seems like practically a libel on the real person, who may have been a little officious about the fact that she had more training than all the other nurses combined, but by all accounts was a good and dedicated nurse.
The show does have some good medical information: there was an unavoidably gruesome but nonetheless very informative amputation scene. I’m sure that in some movie or other I saw doctors literally sawing through a guy’s leg like a fallen tree, but in fact the process was much more involved: the surgeon would tourniquet the limb so the patient wouldn’t bleed out during amputation (in fact, advances in tourniquet technology seem to have been part of the reason why there were so many amputations in the nineteenth century: it made the procedure less deadly), fold back the outer layer of skin and muscle like a shirt cuff so as to sew it shut over the stump at the end of the process, then tie off the arteries so the patient wouldn’t bleed to death during the amputation…
In short, it was quite an involved process, and only about 75% of patients lived through it. But because the doctors didn’t know how to effectively fight infection, it nonetheless lowered the overall mortality rate.
However, one informative amputation in six episodes isn’t enough reason to watch the second season - especially given that only two of season two’s six episodes were directed by women. I won’t be continuing the show.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t terribly impressed. It didn’t help matters that last year I read Pamela S. Toler’s Heroines of Mercy Street, a nonfiction book that was published as a series tie-in (although the book is more well-researched and in depth than you might expect from a tie-in), because that background made it even more obvious where the filmmakers had sensationalized things - and also made that sensationalization more frustrating, because they had plenty of drama already at their fingertips if they had just trusted their material.
Basically, the showrunners decided that they needed to have not one, not two, but three villains: a doctor, a nurse, and a hospital steward, united in their singular focus on personal gain, indifferent to the well-being of the patients.
I’ll grant them the hospital steward. Many of the hospital stewards really do seem to have been grasping men, lining their pockets by selling supplies on the side even though that means the wounded men in their care go hungry and sometimes die because they can’t recover without proper nutrition. However, one villain would have been enough - especially because the bad doctor and nurse could have produced much more interested and varied conflict in the narrative if they had been less one-dimensional.
So, of instance, the army surgeon character is not merely devoted to outdated medical theories (which seems to have been common among army surgeons, and caused friction with civilian contractors), but also a venal, grasping toady who is utterly indifferent to the well-being of his patients. But wouldn’t it be more interesting (and more informative about nineteenth-century medical theory!) if the army surgeon and the civilian contractor both sincerely cared about their patients, and their conflict really did center around the differences of their medical opinions?
Similarly, the show could have gotten plenty of conflict from two well-meaning nurses, one of whom served under Florence Nightingale in the Crimea - yet finds herself subordinate to a nurse with no formal training and comparatively little experience, who nonetheless was appointed head nurse by Dorothea Dix. Instead, it turns the first nurse into a secret tippler who is having an illicit affair with the evil army surgeon.
I found this last particularly annoying, because this nurse character shares a name and backstory with a real person, Anne Hastings. But otherwise the character seems like practically a libel on the real person, who may have been a little officious about the fact that she had more training than all the other nurses combined, but by all accounts was a good and dedicated nurse.
The show does have some good medical information: there was an unavoidably gruesome but nonetheless very informative amputation scene. I’m sure that in some movie or other I saw doctors literally sawing through a guy’s leg like a fallen tree, but in fact the process was much more involved: the surgeon would tourniquet the limb so the patient wouldn’t bleed out during amputation (in fact, advances in tourniquet technology seem to have been part of the reason why there were so many amputations in the nineteenth century: it made the procedure less deadly), fold back the outer layer of skin and muscle like a shirt cuff so as to sew it shut over the stump at the end of the process, then tie off the arteries so the patient wouldn’t bleed to death during the amputation…
In short, it was quite an involved process, and only about 75% of patients lived through it. But because the doctors didn’t know how to effectively fight infection, it nonetheless lowered the overall mortality rate.
However, one informative amputation in six episodes isn’t enough reason to watch the second season - especially given that only two of season two’s six episodes were directed by women. I won’t be continuing the show.
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Date: 2019-10-28 02:11 pm (UTC)That almost always is more interesting. The historical libel would put me off the show, too.
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