As Seen on Television: The Dawn of Modern Medicine

To keep The Knick historically accurate, on-set surgical advisor Dr. Stanley Burns (pictured below) relied on his expertise and his massive collection of historic medical photos stored at The Burns Archive in New York. (Credit: Paul Schiraldi/HBO) They scrub in according to a strict protocol. All instruments are sterile, the patient is put to sleep, and an incision is cut and held open with retractors. Moving into the abdominal cavity, surgeons clamp bleeding arteries and cauterize tissues meticulously to prevent blood loss while also making the surgical field easier to see. Thus far, it seems just like surgery today, but for the numerous people overlooking from elevated theater seats, dressed in formal Victorian outfits. That’s the operating room setting on the Cinemax period medical drama, The Knick. There are a host of other details that make the setting look ancient, but the differences from modern surgery are most striking when things start going wrong. For instance, the patient’s heart rate becomes rapid, then erratic, and the surgeon knows this only because of a nurse listening to the patient with a stethoscope. She can't report blood pressure, because no device is set up to measure it — there are no monitors of any sort. Those devices don’t exist in the era when The Knick is set, nor would they help much, since the time period denies doctors even the most basic tools of resuscitation. The year is 1900, when many basic principles of surgery have been developed, but safe transfusions, electrocardiography, and other vital tools still lay several years into the future.