SECOND OPINION: I would never have become a doctor were it not for a television programme called Mash, writes Pat Harrold.
Not that it was the first medical programme that I saw, but it was the first that appealed to me.
The first I remember is Dr Finlay's casebook. But this was so long ago few will recall.
Dr Finlay was an old GP with a young assistant. The drama lay in the contrasts of wisdom and skill, youth and age, art and science.
The problem, for me, was that the younger doctor was a resolutely sober fellow. This concept was moved to America, where the twinkly older guy was reincarnated as Marcus Welby MD.
All these doctors were disctinctly conventional.
The patients may have suffered for the sake of the programme but the medics were sane, sober and unperturbed.
Mash was set in the 50s, made in the 70s and had a 60s attitude. Its attitude to women was prehistoric. It was set in a mobile army hospital that never seemed to go anywhere.
Surgeon Hawkeye Pierce was dishevelled and anti-authoritarian - an excellent role model for the scruffy teenager I was then.
It certainly had an influence in filling out the CAO form.
I was too callow to grasp that the doctors, while still caring and sincere, were portrayed as deeply troubled.
I imagine the Korean war would have had that effect on you after a while.
If anybody was inspired to put medicine as first choice by Casualty, I would feel they were indeed innocent. By this stage, TV doctors were in freefall.
They were shot, stabbed, addicted, divorced, sued, overworked, betrayed by their colleagues and given terrible hair cuts.
At this stage of my medical drama addiction, I would watch Casualty in a "res" - a kind of junior doctors' staff room in a hospital. It was the only time the res would be quiet, as watching Casualty was a fairly nerve-wracking experience, especially if you were on call for A&E yourself.
There was always a scenario in which a featured actor would be followed and you just knew something terrible would happen to them. After a couple of seasons they got crafty and the inevitable trauma might happen to someone else, or in an unexpected way. For instance, they would walk past the unexploded bomb and fall over a cliff.
The added tension for us was wondering how on earth we would treat the awful injuries portrayed as well as out-guessing the diagnoses. It was, we felt, a form of studying.
If we thought the doctors in Casualty had it tough, you would wonder why anyone would work in ER.
Carter, Abby and company live lives of incredible drudgery and mishap. They only seem to leave the department to get shot, drowned, infected with deadly diseases and dumped by their partners. The drama is fast and furious.
While we're on the subject, I'll let you in on a little secret.
You know when the doors burst open in ER as a casualty is rushed in and there is inevitably a medic screaming a list of abbreviations? Well, we doctors don't know what they mean either. We know what a perforating injury means, but the strings of letters defeat us - on this side of the Atlantic at least.
Once, for a whole season of ER, I managed to mightily intimidate all my colleagues in a British res by successfully guessing the diagnosis before anyone else, even Dr Weaver.
Of course, I never disclosed to them that I had watched each episode earlier in the week on RTÉ.
Doctors in ER are exposed in their human frailties in a way Dr Finlay never had to endure. They cope with their own inadequacies with varying degrees of success. While most of us have neither the intense lifestyles nor the good looks of the docs on ER, we can relate to their struggle to do their best whatever the circumstances.
The irritatingly straight doctor in Glenroe went gratifyingly off the rails and was later reincarnated as Keano.
The brilliant British series Cardiac Arrest was searingly left-wing and probably the most accurate of all.
I didn't watch Holby City. Enough is enough after all.
If ER finally lifted the lid on the medical psyche for the masses, Scrubs has done for doctors what Father Ted did for the clergy.
It is set in a hospital where all the staff are wildly eccentric.
Scrubs manages to combine being incredibly funny with genuine insights and pathos. It beats me how they manage to do it. They even have a Dr Finlay-type consultant who is as daft as any of them.
If Scrubs inspired anyone to apply for medicine this year, they might find that it is closer to the truth than you would think.
And if doctors are humorously portrayed, in all their angst and hubris, it may be no bad thing. After all, the higher the pedestal you set for yourself, the further you have to fall.
Dr Pat Harrold is a general practitioner in Nenagh, Co Tipperary.
Maurice Neligan is on leave.