ABC's 'Hopkins': A Routine, Not Incisive, Operation

If you want a nuanced portrait of 21st-century medicine -- a world dominated by disease prevention, modest improvements in treatment and engineering fixes for making the health-care system safer -- you can find something else to do tonight.

But if you want to see old-fashioned heroic medicine in which the solitary man (who is sometimes a woman) holds the forces of disease, death and tragedy at bay, then by all means tune in to the ABC documentary "Hopkins."

The six-hour film won't disappoint. Unfortunately, it won't educate much either.

"Hopkins," produced by Terence Wrong, is full of stories about the astounding things that human beings can do to fight catastrophic illness and injury. The weapons of choice are scalpel, needle, chest tube and other body-violating modalities. The outcomes are usually clear-cut: life or death, and rarely disability or disappointing improvement.

That is how we like our TV medicine, whether it's "Dr. Kildare," "M*A*S*H" or "ER." That is especially true when the subject is Johns Hopkins Hospital, the Baltimore institution that has been U.S. News & World Report's No. 1 Hospital in America for so many years that the magazine might as well retire the trophy.

In 2000, Wrong produced "Hopkins 24/7," a cinema verite portrait of the hospital. This time it is simply "Hopkins." The name carries the incantatory power of other one-word destinations -- Delphi, Mecca, Lourdes. The unspoken assumption is that if you can drag yourself to Hopkins (figuratively or actually bleeding from the nose and mouth), you will be within shouting distance of cure, and possibly even miracles.

Actually, this is what many Americans expect of modern medicine; Johns Hopkins is the example that stands in for the whole enterprise. The filmmakers do not argue with this expectation. They go to the places where it is most likely to be satisfied -- the surgical suite and the emergency room.

What they find is just one piece of medicine. But nobody can say it isn't a fascinating, harrowing, dramatic and emotional piece inhabited by people of immense skill and seriousness.

"I touch these people's brains, I touch their lives, their emotions, and I can potentially change them at the drop of a pin," Alfredo Quinones-Hinojosa, a neurosurgeon, says in Episode 1 as he is being chased down the hall by the camera crew (a cinematic view repeated endlessly in "Hopkins").

He is about to operate on the brain tumor of a careworn man in his 40s, twice divorced and accompanied only by a female cousin. The man is terrified, and the night before surgery Quinones-Hinojosa is obliged to tell him everything that can go wrong. But then he adds, "Tomorrow, I feel positive."

The next day, Quinones-Hinojosa waits as his patient awakes from anesthesia to reveal what, if any, brain function he has lost. When the man wiggles his toes on command, the surgeon clenches his fists in a gesture of personal triumph one might see in a basketball player sinking a long three-point shot.

Of course, there are costs to these triumphs.