This is one of my all-time favorite episodes of any TV series. (With all the books about TV series, why doesn't somebody do a book lauding the greatest individual episodes?)
It's a good idea for a show and well written but what carries it is Claude Rains, probably the greatest of Hollywood's many great character actors. He plays an old man with a special relationship with his granddaughter, who dies during what should not have been a dangerous operation. While in shock over this, he wanders through the hospital and gets angry because nobody seems to care about the tragedy his family has just endured. People chatter and laugh, oblivious to his feelings. He makes several attempts over a series of days to get what he considers an appropriate response and gets put off by the seemingly disinterested staff and gets angrier and angrier until he decides to do something about it, with tragic results.
Rains makes a meal of this role, one of his greatest, playing all the notes on the piano as he does it, interacting with his son and daughter-in-law, some old friends he likes to hang out with and talking to Kildare, Gillespie and another hospital functionary played by Peter Hansen. The strength of the script is that it neither presents the hospital people as cold or as understanding. They are people trying to do a job as best they can. In other episodes they connect with their patients feelings with great precision, each episode ending with Gillespie summarizing things with warmth and reason. But here they never really connect with Rains' character. He seems to be viewing them- and they him- as if though an opaque shower curtain.
Even Gillepsie's speech about the staff needing to laugh is delivered kind of over Rain's head, as if the good doctor is more interested in removing Rains as a problem by neutralizing his complaint than really empathizing with him.
That's the way it is in life. You can be close to a person but you never really stand in their shoes or see things precisely as they see them. I agree that something a bit more perceptive from Gillespie at the end, (after he and his staff have spent the show failing to be truly perceptive), would have been nice. I suggest that exact conclusion- that we can never really BE someone else or know what it is to be them.