Ep 19. What's Up, Doc?

In the season 6 episode 19 of M*A*S*H, titled "What's Up, Doc?," the men and women of the 4077th are facing a shortage of medical supplies, a common issue during the Korean War. The episode opens with Hawkeye Pierce and B.J. Hunnicutt conducting surgery on a patient with scavenged materials, including a saw from the mess tent and a pair of pliers. The makeshift operation is successful, but it highlights the dire situation the team is facing.

Meanwhile, Colonel Potter is dealing with a different kind of problem. A new Army regulation requires that all personnel have a primary care physician, and the Colonel is assigned a young doctor named Captain Pratt. Pratt is a by-the-book doctor who doesn't quite fit in with the laid-back atmosphere of the 4077th. He's also not well-liked by the other doctors, who find him pompous and inflexible.

As the episode progresses, Pratt's inflexibility begins to cause problems. He insists on conducting heart tests on all of the officers in camp, which causes a backlog at the hospital and takes medical personnel away from more urgent cases. When Hawkeye and B.J. confront him about it, he refuses to budge. "I'm a doctor," he says. "I take care of people's hearts." They retort, "And here we thought you took care of people."

Things come to a head when Pratt diagnoses a patient with hepatitis and orders that the entire camp be tested for the disease. This not only takes medical resources from other cases, but also causes unnecessary panic and stress. Hawkeye and B.J. approach him again, this time more firmly, and force him to consider the bigger picture. "Captain Pratt, you haven't figured it out yet, have you?" says Hawkeye. "This is not a hospital in the States. This is not even a hospital. We are a MASH unit, and we must be equipped and ready to go where the fighting is."

In the end, Pratt has a change of heart. When he sees how hard the doctors, nurses, and corpsmen are working with limited resources, he realizes that they know what they're doing and that he can learn from them. He offers to assist in any way he can and is welcomed into the fold.

"What's Up, Doc?" is a classic episode of M*A*S*H that highlights the resourcefulness and camaraderie of the 4077th. It also addresses the larger issue of the government's disconnect from the reality of the situation on the ground during wartime. The new regulation requiring a primary care physician may have made sense on paper, but it ignored the fact that MASH units operate in a completely different way than civilian hospitals. The episode is a reminder that even in the direst of circumstances, people can come together and find solutions.