As the discussion resumes, Halperin's colleague, the oncologist, offers his thoughts, and then several cancer patients in the audience recount some of their experiences with the impersonal world of high-tech medicine. For the next ten minutes, the subject of doctors and how they practice medicine continues to hold center stage.

Finally, a physician in the audience challenges those onstage and in the audience to look at Edson's work in a different way. "It seems to me this play is about the failure of abstract, critical intelligence," he says. "The only character who 'gets it' is the one who's supposedly not that sharp, and that's the nurse. Why are we focusing exclusively on the doctor-patient relationship when we should be looking at the nurse-patient relationship and what doctors can learn from nurses?" As he speaks, the audience erupts in spontaneous applause. More hands flash up. Behind him an elderly woman, who turns out to be the well-known children's writer Madeleine L'Engle, adds her emphatic agreement. "The only healer in this drama is the nurse."

Thanks to this exchange, the doctors finally begin to talk about what they can learn from caregiving and nursing. This belated consideration of caregiving illuminates much more than one audience's response to a successful Off Broadway play. The fact that so few people publicly recognize the centrality of nursing to the play's message--that intelligence exists not only in medicine but in the kind of caregiving traditionally devalued in our society--highlights the persistence of our ambivalent attitudes toward female caregiving in general and nursing in particular.

Edson's play is almost unique in its reversal of the depiction of nursing we get on stage and screen, in literature and in the daily news. From Marcus Welby, M.D. to ER, TV's medical shows portray a hospital world in which doctors do not only all of the curing but much of the caring. On Chicago Hope, which is frankly hopeless when it comes to nursing, nurses are far more consumed with charting the doctors' love life than taking care of patients. In the show's early episodes, the main nurse character would function one week as a critical-care nurse, the next as an operating-room nurse and the following as a pediatric nurse. Miraculously, she'd managed to be certified all of a sudden in all these nursing specialties. In the new doctor show, Providence, a physician gets more help from the ghost of her dead mother than from real live nurses.

Thanks to extensive lobbying by emergency-room nurses, ER is the one exception to the no-nurses-with-brains-please TV rule. Occasionally ER's nurses stand up for themselves and actually seem to know something about their work. But ER's doctors, on the other hand, do an amazing amount of nursing. In one of last year's most remarkable shows, Dr. Mark Greene even pitched in as a hospice nurse--when a patient's nurse was unable either to manage the patient's pain or cope with her emotions.

The show's most backhanded comment on nursing was the way producers dealt with the chief nursing character Carol Hathaway's longstanding crisis of self-esteem. Since the show began, Hathaway has been grappling with who she wants to be when she grows up. In the 1996-97 season, she seemed to decide--she wanted to be a doctor. So she spent almost the entire season struggling to pass the exams for entrance into medical school. For months, the drumbeat of "you can only be considered smart in healthcare if you make it into medical school" rolled on. Although Hathaway finally decided to remain in nursing, she did so only after demonstrating that she could, in fact, pass the medical school entrance exam (read: she was smart enough to be a guy). And one has to wonder how many viewers felt she simply settled for second best.

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