Lenox Hill is a terrific, moving look at medical care in the NYC hospitals

 The Netflix 8-part series Lenox Hill (2020) should be on everyone's list, a terrific documentary from Ruthie Shatz and Adit Barash that follows over the course of a year or so 4 doctors in the Manhattan hospital: 2 neurosurgeons, one OB-GYN resident, and one ER doctor. We get incredible scenes of these doctors at work in their practice, plus plenty of life-information about each of them and about many of their patients as they deal with life-and-death, critical issues and conditions. The 4 physicians who participate represent, obviously, two extreme ranges of the medical profession: the neurosurgeons are treating the most critically ill, any of them younger patients, all of whom must undergo the most stressful and difficult of surgeries, not all w/ good outcomes by the way. The OB-GYN doc, who is herself pregnant and expecting her first child (in the face of some scary genetic information) in a sense represents the other extreme: her practice, as we watch her work w/ a # of women in their delivery, deals with women (and to a MUCH less extent their partners and families) in the process of giving birth - an extremely stressful passage toward a wonderful life, and a practice that probably has not changed much, for most pregnancies, for many years. The ER doctor, although she, too, must at times deal w/ life-endangered admissions, for the most part depicts here at completely different aspect of the hospital work, the hospital as a de facto social institution: Many walk-ins, generally with cuts, abrasions, dislocations, but also many who clearly one to the hospital for a bed and a sandwich, although their life conditions are generally awful, due to all of the stresses of homelessness and often Rx and alcohol; their presence in the ER is an indictment of the entire health-care and social-services systems in the U.S., and the doctor is heroic in her treatment of these patients whose needs go well beyond the scope of Lenox Hill. The series has its moments of joy and of deep sorrow, not all of it involving the patients, and we see these highly skilled doctors as valiant but also plagued at times by self-doubt. Viewers will not, for the record, that the neurosurgeons in post-op tend to present the most optimistic assessment of their treatments to the patients and their families, when in fact they keep to themselves their doubts and concerns - an extra burden that they carry, as they, unlike the other 2 docs, generally deal w/ long-term cases and often w/ multiple highly invasive surgeries.