An institution is celebrating its birthday these days – there’s no other way to put it – even if it’s not yet a round one: In the fall, almost exactly 28 years ago, the first episode of the US television series “Emergency Room” flickered across the screens. This is not only significant because it helped a hitherto moderately successful actor – known at the time for roles in films such as “The Return of the Killer Tomatoes” – to become a superstar, but above all because the series has since become an internationally valid topos how it should be in a hospital: the alarm goes off all the time, there’s beeping and beeping everywhere, medical staff is constantly running around in hectic fashion. How much this understanding of everyday hospital life has actually penetrated the subconscious was shown recently on a walk through the district town.
It passed near the district clinic, where a shrill and regular noise could be heard. The combination of this and the proximity to a medical facility immediately triggers the mental cinema: Doesn’t that sound like the equipment from Emergency Room? Whereby the medical layman could never be quite sure that all the beeping machines really exist in real life and that it is not a question of the hospital series variant of the Heisenberg compensator with which the inventors of “Star Trek” once elegantly solved elementary problems of higher physics, but that’s another story.
In any case, the mind of the unsuspecting passer-by creates an image of the highest drama, a machine-supported struggle for life and death, or for the life or death of some poor person who needs intensive medical care. It is apparently of such magnitude that the beeping and beeping of the life-saving machines involved can still be heard far outside the Ebersberg emergency room.
Luckily for everyone involved – or in this case: those not involved – the emergency situation turns out to be much less dramatic when passing by. Instead of blood bags and medication, the patient is only missing a few drops of oil: A blind on the outside facade is just squeaking rhythmically lowered.