ro be true to the time of the Korean War," says Dishell. "I also interviewed a lot of doctors who had been in Korea or Vietnam and got stories from them. A lot of sets were developed because one of the doctors I found had home movies. There were a for of stories that we did based on actual things that happened in the war." Dishell, 1,vhose mother, Toddy Dishell, and brothers Don and Ken still live in suburban Detroit, would begin work on each episode by going over a script outline and evaluating what would work or wouldn't work medically and figuring out how to make it right. When he got the first draft, he saw spaces blocked out for medical dia- locrue and he would write in the lines that were needed. He'd read over subse- quent drafts and the final script. "I spent a lot of time with Chad Everett," Dishell recalls. "He used to come into the operating room and watch me work. I offered to take Alan Alda into surgery, but he said he'd be on the floor, fainted, in two minutes. What Alan wanted to know was how I feel when I'm in surgery and how I feel when I have to tell a patient he's going to die. "They recently had a M*A *S*H reunion at the Museum of Radio and Television, and Alan told an anecdote about how I advised him that his char- acter was getting too involved [with the patients], and it totally changed the way he played the scenes. Although Dishell loved his media work, particularly producing and report- ing medical news stories, he gradually cur back to spend more time with his three now-grown children, who work behind the scenes in the music industry: Adam, 31; Shana, 29; and Melissa, 26. "My kids came to me and [com- plained] that I was hardly ever with them anymore, and my wife and I decided it was time for me to come back and be with the family," Dishell recalls. "The first thing I stopped doing was the news. Then M*A*S*11 went off the air and eventually Trapper John went off the air." Over the years, Dishell has taken on shorter-term projects, including West Side Medical, Chicago Medical and Emergency. He tries to keep away from shows where the interest in accuracy is not paramount. Occasionally, he gives talks about his media work and shows a gag reel of some of the outtakes. "My daughter wants me to write a book, and 1 may do that at some point," says Dishell, who is trying to arrange to be in Michigan for the All Classes Reunion associated with the U-M Medical School sesquicentennial celebration. El ROLE MODEL from page 83 affirm the greatness of life. There is a science to the series and an art to the interaction of patients who come under the microscope of the medics at the TV teaching hospital. And Braugher's Benjamin Gideon is a cut above in depicting cutting- edge technology that is at once heal- ing and harrowing. But in nursing others on to good health, the doctors under Gideon get on with their treatments of patients while impatiently treating each other with a tricky mix of respect and distrust that leads to better medicine and bitter pills to swallow. Jealousy and ego are staff infections as common to this crew as they are at any hospital. For Groopman, on-call consult ant to the series, Gideon's Crossing is on target. "The series very close- ly captures the true stories of my- patients and also the emotional, clinical and spiritual dimensions of [my] writing," he says. And when it comes to spirituality, that sense of spirit is often a Jewish one. "There is definitely a Jewish perspective to what T bring to my work, and a very large Jewish dimen- sion to my writing," says Groopman. "This series has enormous poten- tial" to educate, he says, and "it should give people the courage to question and challenge physicians." If they are to do that religiously and regularly, they should also take into account the spiritual side of medicine. Gideon's Crossing crosses boundaries between the here-and-now and the hereafter. "It is important for people not to be afraid of the spiritual dimen- sion," says Groopman. "The operative quote is from Maimonides," Groopman notes. "Every morning when he woke up, he said, 'Let me look at a patient neither as a rich man or a ,poor man, as a friend or as a foe, but let me see only the person within.'" Within Gideon Crossing is an inspired implant of such poetic phi- losophy — one that will do no harm to series TV and one that can possibly do much good. ❑ Gideon's Crossing premieres 10 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 10, on ABC, then moves to its regular time slot at 10 p.m. Wednesdays on Oct. 18. 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