Dr. Welby might not approve

You can learn a lot from watching old TV and movies. For example there is Marcus Welby. For those of you who are under 50 and haven’t come across him on TV reruns, Marcus was a TV doctor who was quite popular about 40 years ago. I happened to see a DVD from the library of his first season from 1969. I learned quite a bit about doctoring in the old days, most of which might be considered malpractice now.

According to Dr. Welby, the proper treatment for child autism is to slap the child repeatedly to get their attention and then force feed them M&Ms. If a person is a tad overweight, the proper thing to do is to give them a stern lecture about keeping their pie hole shut and badger them to shape up and exercise some self control. They should grow a spine, get some will power. Thinking about a vasectomy? Think again: It’s your responsibility to procreate and raise a family! Dr. Welby would be surprised at you and not a little disappointed. Apparently, it was expected that good doctors would do a lot of lecturing in the old days. The credits for Marcus Welby included at least one endorsement by a medical group.

The show reminded me of how women were viewed back in the late ‘60s. Women doctors were a novelty. If one showed up, she was sure to be tentative, meek and deferential to her male counterparts. In one episode featuring a high school student lost in the woods, male students were organized into a search party with one stalwart lad assigned to drive the female students home, presumably where they would be safe and wouldn’t get in the way of the men’s work.

So much for the good old days.

Watching Marcus Welby might seem like some mindless entertainment, but it is also a blast of nostalgia. I am mindful as well how lucky we are to have a visual record of those days. I wasn’t around in the ‘30s or ‘40s but I find it fascinating to watch old movies to see how everyday life was depicted. We get a vision of history that was simply not available before movies and television were invented.

That is one of the things libraries are for, to preserve history and to make it assessable to new generations. It would be disingenuous to claim that we purchased Marcus Welby and other old TV shows to preserve history. We did it because of the demand for entertainment, to satisfy our customers. Still, there are side benefits.

Watching these old TV shows and movies reminds me that attitudes and expectations change very slowly, making it easy to forget what once was considered the norm. Some attitudes persist no matter how hard we work to change them. Even new TV shows depict libraries as quiet, where the public is expected to keep their noses buried in books.

Today, the people sitting quietly in the library are drinking their 50-cent espressos out of the coffee machine with their noses buried in their laptops. The books may well be found online rather than on the shelf. And quiet? Don’t tell that to the retired gents comparing “there I was” stories sitting by the newspaper racks or to the kids coming out of story hour. The library of today is a place for people as much as books. I wonder what Marcus Welby would have to say about that?