"Sympathy for the Devil" Watch the clip below from 5:07 to 5:53
"Stairway to Heaven" Watch the clip below from 2:11 to 4:29
Season 5, episode 12 and 13 of “Grey’s Anatomy” ( Sympathy for the Devil and Stairway to Heaven) place on the table heart wrenching questions of morality, judgment of the innocent and guilty, and ultimately judgment of oneself. The doctors at Seattle Grace Hospital find themselves trapped in a maze of right and wrong decisions. What’s moral in one’s heart might not be the protocol of the hospital, the institution that the doctors have devoted their lives to. Seattle Grace serves as the doctors own prison where “a body of knowledge [is] being constantly built up from the everyday behavior of the inmates; it [is] organized as an instrument of perpetual assessment” (Foucault 1491). Being that Seattle Grace is a teaching hospital, perpetual assessment is a given, however when grappling with questions as weighty as if a convicted murder about to walk down death row deserves to have medical rights, the assessment becomes questionable as does the knowledge that determines what the assessment’s outcome should be.
A critical patient, young Jackson is admitted to Seattle Grace with an extreme and life threatening diagnosis. In order to save his life, he will need new intestines and a new liver. A convicted serial killer, Mr. Dun is also in the hospital in need of brain surgery. This man, this criminal, knows he will die from lethal injection in 5 days, but wants to die sooner. Second year resident Meredith Grey intervenes in efforts to save Jackson’s life and to grant Mr. Dun’s dying wish. Watching "Stairway to Heaven" from 13:34 to 14:29 shows the conflict that ensues when the brain surgeon Dr. Shepherd finds out about Dr. Grey’s morally questionable actions.
It is notable that Dr. Grey has been going about letting Mr. Williams suffer from a seizure that caused hemorrhaging, in order to fulfill his wishes. When Dr. Grey knows she is not under supervision, she engages in actions that are against hospital policy. However, when faced with her superior, she has no authority, no power and thus must allow Dr. Shepherd to proceed with the surgery to save Mr. Dun’s life. This shows that Seattle Grace Hospital exemplifies that “the acquisition of skills is inextricably linked with the establishment of power relations” (Foucault 1491). Dr. Shepherd is an attending, while Dr. Grey is only a resident, meaning she has to respect the demands of the higher-ranking doctor. She must allow this murder a second chance at life.
In this episode the audience see’s Dr. Bailey, Jacksons lead surgeon grappling with the morality of letting Mr. Dun die in exchange for his organs as well. In the beginning of the "Stairway to Heaven" episode, at about 3:55 to 4:29, Dr. Bailey initially speaks the words, “were doctor’s, Grey were not executioners,” only to have those same words spoken back to her by Dr. Shepherd. At 18:48 to 20:25 in "Stairway to Heaven" the audience sees a different side of Dr. Bailey, a side that has been watching an innocent boy die. A side of her emerges that wants to fight for her patient at any cost, even the cost of another life. The reason she is able to do this is because this man gave up his right to life when he took five other lives himself. Being a criminal has reduced this man to simply organs. Dr. Bailey feels as though Mr. Dun being buried with his organs intact is a crime in itself because he no longer deserves this right, because her own patient is someone who deserves them more than he does. In this way, the audience sees the effects of living in a carceral society; “by operating at every level of the social body and by mingling ceaselessly the art of rectifying and the right to punish, the universality of the carceral lowers the level from which it becomes natural and acceptable to be punished” (Foucault 1498). Dr. Bailey is using the idea that because it is natural for Mr. Dun to have a severe punishment for his severe crimes, then it’s justifiable to let him die before his execution date in efforts to save another person, an innocent person. Even though at the end of that scene, Dr. Bailey allows Dr. Shepherd to continue surgery on Mr. Dun, in that moment she created her own knowledge, her own logic, her own truth. That truth could have cost Mr. Dun his life. Dr. Shepherd’s truth could cost Jackson his life. When the pledge to save lives includes saving a person who has taken lives on his own accord, does the oath still ring logical?
Two times so far, we have seen doctors ask the question, “Am I an executioner or am I a surgeon?” These doctors see themselves through a panoptic lense. They walk into the operating room seeing themselves as others see them, as surgeons who save lives. However when confronted with a different perspective the line between what one sees themselves as and the subject view of that same being, brings into question the validity of their knowledge, and the solidity of their values.
In the conclusion of the episode, Mr. Dun survives his surgery and gets to proceed to his own execution by lethal injection, and young Jackson receives organs from a patient in the hospital who is comatose. Mr. Dun escapes the hospital carceral system only to head right into another one. The audience can thus understand the hospital as an extension for the completion of the carceral system. In order to fulfill the sentence for Mr. Dun, he needed to be alive for 5 more days, which meant hospitalization and surgery. It is evident that “the carceral network does not cast the unassimilable into a confused hell; there is no outside. It takes back with one hand what it seems to exclude with the other. It saves everything, including what it punishes. It is unwilling to waste even what it has decided to disqualify” (Foucault 1496). The justice system, as well as the doctors are guilty of this. We see Dr. Shepherd uttering this same idea in "Sympathy for the Devil" from 5:07 - 5:53, "He's trying to cheat the system, and we're not going to let him do it." For Jackson, there is a light at the end of the tunnel signaling his recovery, and eventual leave from Seattle Grace.
Works Cited
Foucault, Michael. "Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison." Ed. Vincent Leitch. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Second Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc, 2010. Print.
http://www.megavideo.com/?v=YI6MXE60
http://www.megavideo.com/?d=80OHO29D
