The lawyer taking the deposition wants to know: Does Jed Hill have a God complex? The surgeon—his hair sleek, his suit impeccable, his tie crimson—answers with quiet authority.

“I have an MD from Harvard. I am board certified in cardiothoracic medicine and trauma surgery. I have been awarded citations from seven different medical boards in New England. And I am never, ever sick at sea.

“So I ask you,” he continues with a slow stroke of his chin, “when someone goes into that chapel and they fall on their knees and they pray to God that their wife doesn’t miscarry or that their daughter doesn’t bleed to death…who do you think they’re praying to?”

The surgeon leans forward and concludes with a taut curve of his lips, part smirk and part sneer: “You ask me if I have a God complex. Let me tell you something: I am God.”

With that pronouncement, Alec Baldwin’s self-consecrated surgeon in the 1993 thriller Malice became a cinematic icon. But he’s not just the archetype of imperious doctors or even, as the plot unfolds, of rakish swindlers. He also embodies Hollywood’s take on Harvard Medical School graduates: brilliant, arrogant, and deserving of plot twists.

School of Marred Docs

Often HMS seems merely an easy reach for screenwriters; the psychiatric resident who clashes with his morally flexible mother in the 2002 movie Laurel Canyon and the medical resident intent on romancing women in the 2006 movie Ways of the Flesh could have graduated from any school.

Occasionally the choice of HMS as an alma mater does seem thoughtful: Wilbur Larch, a doctor who runs an orphanage in The Cider House Rules, earned his degree from the School; the grandfather of the character’s creator, John Irving, was a member of the Class of 1910. And sometimes HMS acts as a marker for intelligence. Alumna Lexie Grey, a surgical resident on Grey’s Anatomy, has a photographic memory, a knack that earns her the nickname Lexipedia when she remembers not only a neurovascular disease mentioned in an obscure otolaryngology journal, but also the journal article’s volume, issue, and page numbers.

For the most part, though, the composite fictional portrait of HMS graduates that has emerged over the past few decades has been unflattering, with doctors falling into a limited range of caricature, from supercilious surgeons to patronizing pathologists to irritable internists. John Becker, an HMS graduate on the television sitcom Becker, for example, bristles with hostility. “I will kill you,” he promises a colleague. “And then I’ll use my powers as a physician to bring you back to life. And then—I will kill you again!”

The Divine Right of Kings

HMS resides at the intersection of two institutions often considered synonymous with condescension: Harvard and U.S. medicine. So it may come as no surprise that the characteristic Hollywood most commonly bestows upon the School’s fictional graduates is arrogance.

Some fictional alumni grow arrogant as a result of their power to save lives. Take Stephen Franklin, a twenty-third-century graduate of the School. As chief medical officer on the science fiction series Babylon 5, he compassionately cares for a range of alien life forms. When he fails to save the lives of several wounded Minbari—members of a humanoid species whose cranial crest resembles the bony frill of a dehorned Styracosaurus—he autopsies one of the aliens to understand its anatomy and physiology, in the hope of being able to rescue future patients.

Yet even Franklin echoes Jed Hill’s self-aggrandizing beliefs. When his space station commander demands to know who asked him to play God, Franklin retorts, “Every damn patient who comes through that door, that’s who! People come to doctors because they want us to be gods….They want to be healed and they come to me when their prayers aren’t enough. Well, if I have to take the responsibility, then I claim the authority too.”

Other fictional graduates flaunt not their own sense of divinity so much as their divine rights as Harvard alumni. In one episode of the television series Frasier, psychiatrist Frasier Crane complains to his station manager about the prankster whose call-in radio program follows his. “I did not spend eight grueling years at Harvard,” he fumes, “to be mocked by that juvenile jackass!”

“Shameless!” she cries.

“Oh, he’s beyond shameless!”

“I’m talking,” she says, “about the way you manage to get Harvard into every conversation!”

The psychiatrist just can’t help himself. Minutes later, to bolster his argument, he declares, “I am a doctor! I went to…” He trails off as he catches the station manager’s withering look and finishes, with an embarrassed bobble of his head, “…medical school!”

Still other fictional graduates vaunt the exquisite pedigree that had made Harvard their only possible choice for medical school. Charles Emerson Winchester III, a Korean War surgeon on M*A*S*H, speaks in lofty, nasal tones. “Due to my background and breeding,” he proclaims, “it was inevitable that I attend the finest schools: Choate, Harvard…” to which his fellow surgeon Hawkeye Pierce helpfully adds, “the Massachusetts Institute of Snobbery!”

The Twilight Zone

While many fictional matriculants cultivate monstrous egos, others are simply monsters. One of the more sympathetic screen characters to have attended the School is, in fact, a vampire. As a victim of the 1918 flu pandemic, Edward Cullen—the smoldering-eyed undead hero of the 2008 movie Twilight—had been dying in a Chicago hospital when a vampiric physician took pity on him, plunged venom into his neck to lend him immortality, and adopted him.

Now forever 17, the conscience-stricken Cullen wants to compensate for his unnatural nature. He battles other vampires to save the lives of humans, and he practices “vegetarian” vampirism, imbibing the blood of animals rather than humans. Like his adoptive father, he even once studied medicine, though he has yet to complete his HMS degree. After warning his mortal love interest not to requite his affection, he tells her, in winsome anguish, “I don’t want to be a monster!”

Some fictional graduates don’t seem to mind being monsters. After graduating at the top of his class at HMS, Ted Grey, the protagonist of the 2008 movie Pathology, lands a spot at one of the nation’s most prestigious residency programs in pathology. There, in the opening lecture, he hears his new adviser declaring, “I like to think of the pathologist as offering a window to God”—words any fictional graduate might long to hear.

Attracted by his cold confidence and superior skills, his fellow residents lure Grey into joining their clique. He soon uncovers their secret—an after-hours morgue game of let’s-see-who-can-commit-the-perfect-murder. It doesn’t take long for him to join in their game of playing God by murdering those they term “irredeemable filth”—pedophiles, pimps, and murderers.

Eventually, though, Grey realizes his fellow residents aren’t simply conducting vigilante killings; they’re also murdering for sport. When Grey fails to save his fiancée from being slain, he proceeds to autopsy her killer—while the paralyzed perpetrator is still agonizingly alive.

Extreme Measures

Not all the School’s fictional graduates are arrogant, and not all play God. But most are extreme, if not in character, talent, or immortal status, then in storyline. Abbey Bartlet, a thoracic surgeon who’s married to the U.S. president on The West Wing, faces an unusual predicament. For years she has been administering interferon beta-1b to her husband to keep his multiple sclerosis a secret from the nation. Only when he collapses does she reveal his illness to a member of the White House staff. Her decision to treat the serious illness of a family member clandestinely and without establishing a medical record—in egregious violation of several principles of medical ethics—leads her to give up her medical license for the duration of her time in the White House.

But Bartlet’s storyline is mundane compared with the one Damien Karras must follow. Karras had become a Jesuit priest before attending HMS. Yet neither his spiritual calling nor his psychiatric training could have prepared him for his biggest challenge: curing a levitating, green-bisque-spewing prepubescent girl of her demonic possession.

In The Exorcist, Karras initially scoffs at the family’s request for the ancient ritual. No one has believed in demonic possession, he assures the girl’s mother, “since we learned about mental illness, paranoia, schizophrenia—all the things they taught me in Harvard.” Yet Karras soon realizes that his Harvard training is powerless in the face of a malevolence that causes rooms to turn frigid, furniture to shake violently, and a girl’s head to rotate completely—and creakily—on her neck. In the end, Karras taunts the demon into possessing him and then hurls himself down a long flight of stone steps, sacrificing his own life to save his patient.

Sadly, the HMS graduate lives to die another day. In The Exorcist III: Legion, a spawn of the original movie, we find Karras possessed by another evil spirit, escaped from his grave, and housed in a psychiatric hospital. Eventually he becomes implicated in his possessor’s latest killing spree and is shot to death.

Be True to Your School

Other medical schools can claim fictional alumni, of course. Yale takes credit for psychiatrist Niles Crane, Frasier’s pretentious younger brother. Stanford graduated Cristina Yang, an ambitious surgeon on Grey’s Anatomy; B. J. Hunnicutt, an easygoing surgeon on M*A*S*H; and Bob Kelso, the callous chief of medicine on Scrubs. Tufts educated Jordan Cavanaugh, the grim-faced medical examiner on Crossing Jordan, and Jennifer Melfi, the long-suffering psychiatrist to the eponymous mobster on The Sopranos.

But HMS, whose fictional graduates have numbered at least two dozen in the past few decades, easily edges out even Johns Hopkins, its closest rival. Eric Foreman, the pensive neurologist on House, MD, graduated from Hopkins, as did Ellie Bartlet, the president’s middle daughter on The West Wing, and Preston Burke and Erica Hahn, two hard-driving cardiothoracic surgeons on Grey’s Anatomy.

Hopkins may not have Harvard’s numbers, but it competes well in the realm of extreme character. Although not a graduate of the medical school, Hannibal Lecter—the infamous cannibal from The Silence of the Lambs who complements his liver entrées with fava beans and a nice Chianti—trained at the Johns Hopkins Hospital.

But the Hopkins matriculant who should have attended Harvard instead is the curmudgeonly protagonist of House. Gregory House comes straight from HMS casting, with a distended ego and a self-anointed divinity. “You will trust my diagnosis,” he tells an Orthodox Jew, the husband of a patient, “because in this temple, I am Dr. Yahweh.”

To parse the Harvard–Hopkins screen rivalry, we turned to The Simpsons, a finely tuned cultural barometer that features a graduate of each school. Julius Hibbert, the Simpson family physician, earned his medical degree from Hopkins. A genial genius who giggles at disconcertingly inappropriate moments, Hibbert tends to offer dubious solutions to medical dilemmas. When Homer Simpson loses a thumb, for instance, Hibbert cheerfully suggests lopping off the other one for symmetry. To reduce his malpractice liability, he buys a T-shirt with the slogan “Do Not Resuscitate,” muttering, “This could get me out of a lot of sticky situations.”

How could Harvard possibly top such an eccentric character? With Eleanor Abernathy, better known as the Crazy Cat Lady. As a young woman with degrees from HMS and Yale Law School, Abernathy had enjoyed two successful careers. In one flashback scene, while representing a client in court, she asks to be excused to deliver a baby. Exhaustion, however, has led to alcoholism, and as the years have passed Abernathy has gradually loosened her grip on reality. In one episode, a new medication allows her to regain lucidity; while rational, she can speak intelligently about health care reform. The placebo effect wears off, though, when she learns the pills are really Reese’s Pieces.

Lisa Simpson, ever sympathetic to the downtrodden, films a Kidz Newz report in front of Abernathy’s modest Springfield home. “People say she’s crazy just because she has a few dozen cats,” Lisa earnestly says into the microphone. “But can anyone who loves animals that much really be crazy?” The door slams open and Abernathy answers Lisa’s question in her signature way: With flyaway gray hair and a snaggletoothed grimace, she lunges forward, shrieking incoherently and hurling first a black cat, then a tabby, as a mess of yowling, panicked felines squirm in her arms and gird themselves for flight.

Natural Selection

Where on screen, we wondered, could we find normal graduates of the School? Where were the thoughtful and caring physicians who didn’t autopsy aliens, dissect their colleagues, or catapult kitties? For guidance we turned to a real-life graduate who works in Hollywood. Neal Baer ’96 had left his position as a writer and executive producer of ER years earlier, but as executive producer of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, he still had two fictional doctors under his creative control. So we asked him: What medical schools had they attended?

“Well,” he said, “I never really thought about it. Um, I guess Columbia and Cornell?”

We dutifully jotted down his answer, but when we reported back to members of the Bulletin’s Editorial Board, they weren’t impressed by our journalistic objectivity. Go back to him, they urged. Claim those doctors for Harvard!

So at our next opportunity we asked Baer: Why not Harvard? “Fine,” he answered, without a hint of the peevishness so characteristic of his screen counterparts. And with that word, the School gained two new fictional graduates, doctors it could be proud to claim: George Huang, an insightful and empathetic psychiatrist, and Melinda Warner, a tough and yet not flinty medical examiner.

The School’s list of fictional graduates only promises to grow. One Harvard hopeful can be found in a movie now in development; the screenplay has been written and optioned, and actor Orlando Bloom has been discussed as a possible lead. Based on a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, Eliza Graves takes place in a remote psychiatric hospital. A recent HMS graduate accepts a job there, not realizing that the patients have staged a coup and are now running the hospital. Eventually the plot twists to reveal that the young man is himself a former patient—perhaps even an escaped one?—of another psychiatric hospital. We can only hope the movie wraps before Hopkins recruits him.

This article appeared in The Hollywood Issue of the Harvard Medical Alumni Bulletin.