The Hospital (1971)

George C. Scott: Dr. Herbert Bock

Photos 

Quotes 

• Edmund Drummond : So at 9:15 this morning I rang for my nurse...

  Bock : Rang for your nurse?

  Edmund Drummond : To ensure one full hour of uninterrupted privacy.

  Bock : Of course.

• Herbert Bock : I mean, where do you train your nurses, Mrs. Christie--Dachau?

• Herbert Bock : Now what in hell am I going to tell this boy Schaefer's parents? That a substitute nurse assassinated him because she couldn't tell the doctors from the patients on the floor?

• Herbert Bock : You know, when I say impotent, I don't mean merely limp... When I say impotent, I mean I've lost even my desire to work. That's a hell of a lot more primal passion than sex. I've lost my reason for being - my purpose. The only thing I ever truly loved.

• Herbert Bock : It is all rubbish isn't it? I mean... transplants, antibodies. We manufacture genes. We can produce birth ectogenetically. We can practically clone people like carrots, and half the kids in this ghetto haven't even been inoculated for polio. We have established the most enormous medical... entity ever conceived, and people are sicker than ever. We cure nothing! We heal nothing! The whole goddamn wretched world, strangulating in front of our eyes.

• Barbara : I have a thing about middle-aged men.

  Bock : I admire your candor.

  Barbara : You've been admiring a lot more than that.

• Barbara : We could really use you down there, you know there's a curiously high incidence of TB. You would be a doctor again, Herb. You would be necessary again. If you love me, I don't see what other choice you have?

  Herbert Bock : What do you mean if I love you? I raped you in a suicidal rage, how do we get to love and children all the sudden?

• Bock : A man comes into this hospital in perfect health, and in the space of one week, we chop out one kidney, damage another, reduce him to coma, and damn near kill him.

  Dr. Brubaker : Yes, sir.

  Bock : You know, Brubaker, last night I sat in my hotel room, reviewing the shambles of my life - and contemplating suicide. I said, "No, Bock. No, don't do it. You're a doctor, you're a healer. You're the Chief of Medicine at one of the great hospitals of the world. You are a necessary person. Your life is meaningful." Then I walk in here, today, and I find out that one of my doctors. was killed by a couple of nurses who mistook him for a patient; because, he screwed a technician from the Nephrology Lab.

  Dr. Brubaker : Hematology.

  Bock : And now you come to me with this gothic horror story in which the entire machinery of modern medicine has apparently conspired to destroy one lousy patient. Now, how am I to sustain my feeling of meaningfulness in the face of this?

• Barbara : It's hard for me to take your despair very seriously, Doctor. You obviously enjoy it so much.

  Bock : Oh, bugger off! That's all I need now, is clinical insight. Some cockamamie 25-year-old *acidhead* is gonna reassure me about the menopause now!

• Dr. Brubaker : What about the girl? She says we have no legal right to stop her from taking her father out. She's willing to sign an AOR form.

  Bock : Let him go - before we kill him.

• Bock : You're greedy, unfeeling, inept, indifferent, self-inflating, and unconscionably profitable. Besides that, I have nothing against you. I'm sure you play a hell of a game of golf.

• Barbara : All that's going on in there, Doctor, is a simple Apache prayer for my father's recovery. The markings he's made on my father's arms are from the pollen of the tule plant. The twigs have no significance, other than they've been struck by lightning and are consequently appeals to the spirit of lightning. It's all entirely harmless, Doctor. A religious ceremony, not a medical one.

  Bock : You don't seriously believe all that mumbo jumbo's gonna cure him?

  Barbara : On the other hand, it won't kill him, Doctor.

• Barbara : I fancied you from the first moment you came lumbering down that hallway, upstairs. I said to Mr. Blacktree, "Who's that hulking bear of a man?" Apaches are reverential about bears. Won't eat bear meat, never skin bears. Bears are thought of as both benign and evil, but very strong power. Men with bear power are highly respected and are said to be great healers. "That man," I said, "gets his power from the bear."

  Bock : Swell.

• Bock : What do you say, Miss Drummond?

  Barbara : I expect you can call me Barbara... considering you ravished me three times last night... .

  Bock : Three times?

  Barbara : Oh, look at him pretending he didn't count. You were as puffed up as a toad about it. Punched a couple of holes in your crusade for universal impotence, didn't it? I think we're on first-name basis now.

• Bock : You and I better have a chat, Mrs. Christie, about your excessive use of float nurses.

  Mrs. Christie : I've got nearly a thousand nurses in this hospital.

  Bock : Every time one of them has her period, she disappears for three days. My doctors complain regularly they can't find the same nurse on the same floor two days in a row.

• Bock : We've got a 23-year-old boy. I threw him out of the house last year. A shaggy-haired Maoist. I don't know where he is. Presumably, building bombs in basements as an expression of universal brotherhood.

• Dr. Einhorn : I see a man exhausted, emotionally drained, riddled with guilt, has been systematically stripping himself of wife, children, friends - isolating himself from the world. Are you impotent?

  Bock : Intermittently.

  Dr. Einhorn : What does that mean?

  Bock : It means I haven't tried in so long, I don't know.

• Dr. Brubaker : Somebody ought to ream his ass.

  Bock : I'm going to ream his ass.

• Bock : Get me Dr. Gillie. I want to talk to him right now. Put him on page, if you have to. I don't care if he's operating.

• Bock : He shrieked at me: "You old fink. You can't even get it up anymore." That was it, you see. That was his real revolution. It wasn't racism or the oppressed poor or the war in Vietnam. No. The ultimate American societal sickness was a limp dingus.

• Bock : My God. If there is a despised, misunderstood minority in this country it is us poor, impotent bastards. Well, I'm impotent and I'm proud of it. Impotence is beautiful, baby! Power to the impotent! Right on, baby!

• Bock : I'm middle class. Among us middle class, love doesn't triumph over all - responsibility does.

• Dr. Sundstrom : Do you want to take a couple of days off?

  Bock : No.

  Dr. Sundstrom : Go down to Montego Bay, get drunk, get laid, get a little sun?

  Bock : For God's sake, I'm 53 years old, with all the attendant fears. I just left my wife, after 24 years. A standard case of menopausal melancholy.

  Dr. Sundstrom : Maybe you wanna see Joe Einhorn.

  Bock : Don't wanna see a psychiatrist. Stop worrying about me. All I got to do is get my ass back to work, I'll be fine.

• Dr. Brubaker : I've seen some pretty good snafus. But this one - there's a certain splendor to this one. One of the night nurses... thought Schaefer was a patient and plugged an IV into him. He was a diabetic, you know.

  Bock : What do you mean she plugged an IV into him?

  Dr. Brubaker : It's a really screwed-up story, Doc. You see, what happened was we had an old man in that bed who died last night. So the bed was available. You know Schaefer. He's Sammy Stud.

  Bock : So, he talked a nurse into zapping him on the bed?

  Dr. Brubaker : One of the girls from Hematology he's been running around with.

  Bock : God, it's a Roman farce!

• Barbara : I don't want my father in this hospital. I had a dream about this hospital. I dreamt this enormous, starched, white-tile building suddenly erupted like a volcano, and all the patients, doctors, nurses, attendants, orderlies, the whole line-staff, food-service people, the aged, the lame, and you, right in the middle, were stampeding in one hideous, screaming, suicidal mass into the sea. I'm taking my father out of here and as quickly as I can.

  Bock : You're really a fruitcake, you know?

• Bock : I'll defrock those two cannibals. They will never again practice in this hospital. I'll tell you that.

• Bock : What do you mean, if I love you? I *raped* you in a suicidal rage.

• Bock : What the hell is going around on? Every time I try to find somebody in this hospital, they either died of a heart attack in emergency or anesthesia shock in an Operating Room.

• Bock : Why didn't you let me do it?

• Bock : I'm sitting here boozing and you come in and tell me some demented story about your father's religious conversion.

  Barbara : You miss the point, Doctor. Not my father's conversion, mine. You see, I'd been hitting the acid pretty regularly at that time. I'd achieved a few minor sensory deformities, some suicidal despairs, but nothing as *wild* as fluency in an obscure Apache dialect. I mean, like, "Wow, man!" Here was living afflatus right before my eyes!

• Bock : You're wasting your time. I've been impotent for years.

  Barbara : Rubbish.

  Bock : What the hell is wrong with being impotent? Kids are more hung up on sex than the Victorians. I got a son, 23 years old. I threw him out of the house last year. Pietistic little humbug. He preached universal love, he despised everyone.

• Bock : What in the hell is this? Some kind of plague?

• Bock : [on the phone]  Gillie? Bock. Listen, didn't you tell me a couple months ago you were gonna cut off all privileges for that assassin, Welbeck? Welbeck, yes! He just butchered another one of my patients!

• Bock : Unexplained anemia, leukopenia. Unexplained elevation of the serum gamma globulin level. Especially abnormal flocculation tests, and of course, a positive PPD. Now, all of these findings assume special significance in Negroes.