J.D. from Scrubs is not a bad doctor, despite his short attention span and feud with the janitorial staff. He saves more people than he doesn't and when he fails to save a patient he goes to sleep at night in the knowledge that he did everything he could. He's caring, compassionate and dedicated to his job. One of the recent arguments against a female Doctor (or Doctor Who for the five remaining people on the planet who aren't fans) was that the Doctor was a rare non-violent role model for young boys. Whether this is a valid argument or not (pre-Moffat the Doctor had committed genocide of at least two species, including his own, which is hardly an argument for non violence) J.D. definitely addresses the deficit. Unfortunately, Sacred Heart is a teaching hospital and J.D. is a terrible teacher. Much like Betty Suarez, his strengths as a doctor act against him as a teacher: he is too kind, too compassionate, wants too badly to be liked to establish any kind of discipline. In one epsiode he neglects work to find out who wrote the one bad evaluation in an otherwise glowing batch so he can track the student down and change their mind, even though the evaluation gives constructive feedback that he cares too much about being liked. Learning from Doctor Cox might be terrifying but at least he produces good doctors. J.D. produces feelgood slideshows. It's like he's trying to be the teacher from Dead Poet's Society but in a setting where the students actually need to knuckle down and work hard because if they don't pay attention they aren't going to mistake iambic pentameter for dactylic hexameter but potentially misdiagnose and kill a patient.
Kate Taylor has a BA in English Literature and Creative Writing and an MRes in Creative Writing. Her nonfiction, reviews and other articles have appeared on Cuckoo Review and Mookychick as well as WhatCulture. Her fiction has been published in Luna Station Quarterly, Eternal Haunted Summer and in anthologies by Paizo and Northumbria University Press. She is 23 and lives in the North of England.
