This is the premise for a TV show called The Infirmary I pitched with Robert Palm in 2012. The script and the premise are damn good–first woman doctor in the United States, Walt Whitman and Body Snatchers!–and I’m as proud of this pilot as I am of anything I’ve written.
The show was not picked up, killed by one part Copper (BBC) and one part The Knick (Showtime), but I learned more about writing from my time with Robert Palm than I have in any other period.
Robert Palm is a reporter turned screenwriter. He got his start on Miami Vice, and his first produced script–Sonny Crockett’s wedding–was viewed by 34 million people.
Later, he would work with Dick Wolf on Law & Order, and later still, he was the show runner for Law & Order SVU, among many other writing and producing credits.
When I pitched my idea for a TV show about Elizabeth Blackwell, Robert had no real incentive to help me. But he did it anyway. Later, he would tell me that some Hollywood old-timer helped him and basically told him to do the same. I’ll always be grateful.
Robert came to Columbus GA in March 2012 where we created a beat sheet for our show The Infirmary. In retrospect, I’m not sure how much I “created.” Instead, I watched Robert map out the beats with such a finely tuned sense of story I felt like I had been allowed to go behind the curtain watch a master at work. That is not overstated. I spent the entire three days trying to keep up. But I was learning too. How to create more efficient and varied story beats, how to twist stories, add conflict, and how to eliminate dramatic redundancies. When we separated on Tuesday, we had mapped out the entire pilot episode. Now all we had to do was write the damn thing.
We divided up the pilot into acts: Robert would take acts 1 & 3; I would take acts 2 & 4. I wrote and rewrote and rewrote Act 2, and when it was time to share the pages, I was terrified. Again, Robert encouraged me with this baseball analogy:
This is my clunky transition to Elizabeth Blackwell, an important character in Speakers of the Dead. In 1847, when women did not study medicine, Blackwell became a student at Geneva Medical College in upstate New York after the other 150 medical students, who believed the application was a joke, voted to accept her. Her interest in becoming a doctor came from watching a close friend die from a painful disease. Blackwell came to believe that women patients would benefit from a woman doctor. After graduating from Geneva in 1849, Blackwell moved to Paris to pursue her dream of becoming a surgeon. There, while treating an infant with ophthalmia neonatorum, she lost her sight in one eye when some of the contaminated solution squirted in her eye. Blackwell returned to New York City, where she opened her own clinic. Her sister, Emily, along with Marie Zakrzewska, both MDs, joined her in 1857 to help run her newly established New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children.
In our script, Robert came up with the idea to call Marie Zakrzewska “Zacky.” I kept this nickname in Speakers of the Dead in part to pay homage to Robert Palm. I also like the significance of Elizabeth’s and Zacky’s relationship: a mentorship. Blackwell dedicated her life to helping women in medicine: both as caregivers and patients. She did this because she believed in what she was doing, and she wanted to help. Zacky (and her sister, Emily) benefited from this mentorship. Just as I did.