THE HOSPITAL MAKERS

A double-decker medical-procedural written by a doctor with more elan (you hope) in his original art and proceeding out of the large New York hospital with which he is identified (that old brick red, new pink one). There you meet some of its towering figures (Rintman, a great diagnostician, who can get a more accurate verdict without those rubber gloves; Emmerich, a surgeon who dies of an inoperable cancer) as well as one young man who will inherit Emmerich's white coat -- Jim Morelle, who loves most passionately once and then marries a more appropriate girl. There's not too much on the venereal -- in the classical sense -- side; mostly a great many admissions -- a terminal malignancy here, myasthenia gravis there, with the climactic struggle devolving around the hospital's refusal to merge and move (to Westchester) as it retains its own independent identity. Think of it as a sterile pack for that absorbent and ever available audience -- it would be Frank Slaughter's.