I always enjoyed the Dr. Kildare series. The casting was excellent, especially Lionel Barrymore as the irascible Dr. Gillespie. If it were not for him, I doubt this series would have been as popular as it was. I believe this is number four in the series, and by this time Dr. Kildare and nurse Mary Lamont are in love, but Dr. Kildare only makes twenty dollars a month as an intern, so he doesn't feel like he can support a wife. Thus he has made no promises to Mary. Remember, back in these days (1940) women always quit their jobs when they got married. Thus Mary has started dating a young brain surgeon, who also has happened to lose a lot of patients lately. He finally gets suspended from the hospital when the last of his patients has gone insane seemingly as a result of the surgery he has performed.
At this point Dr. Kildare takes up the case of proving that the patient is not insane as a result of the surgery by jolting him back to sanity via insulin shock therapy. This primitive method that was long a mainstream treatment for mental patients involves injecting someone with a large dose of insulin and then sitting back and seeing what develops. As a diabetic I can tell you what develops, sweating followed by seizures, possibly followed by death or coma. However, the medical profession, which had a primitive understanding of diabetes and insulin seventy years ago, thinks that what happens is that the human brain regresses back to its primitive self, then back to its evolved present and that the patient's sanity is sometimes restored in the process. This is how Dr. Kildare explains it in the film and it is both hilarious and somewhat shocking.
There are some other jaw-droppers such as after long hours in surgery when all the doctors and nurses involved light up a cigarette - in the hospital, still in their surgical gowns. Note that there is no such thing as biomedical monitoring equipment - nurses just come by each patient and "look in on them". There are a few things that are better in 1940 than today. For one, Dr. Gillespie isn't afraid to hand out straight talk to patients about their culpability involving their conditions. Today doctors are afraid to mention that an overweight patient might lose a little weight and improve their situation because they are so fearful of lawsuits.
