Hospital Gurney Scene

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

The universal way for a character enters a hospital is to have the injured character on a gurney, being pulled down a long corridor into an operating room, with assorted doctors and friends surrounding him. This whole thing is often accompanied by a POV Shot of our character looking up at a doctor.

When the place the gurney is headed is more sinister, our character may be strapped to the gurney to struggle.

Examples of Hospital Gurney Scene include:

Anime and Manga

Film

Gomez: [passionately] Are you in unbearable pain, my love? Is it inhuman? My darling, is it torture?
Morticia: [coyly] Oui!

  • Monty Python's The Meaning of Life opens with a POV shot of a woman in labor on a gurney, crashing through about 10 sets of doors.
  • Played straight in RoboCop as the horribly maimed Murphy is rushed into a trauma bay.
  • Played straight in a terrifying manner in Jacob's Ladder.
  • Inverted in Star Trek IV the Voyage Home—the gurney bit is when they're trying to get out of the hospital, without being caught. The "patient" is perfectly fine by this point.
  • Done hilariously in Evolution, when Doctor Harry Block has an insect-like alien get into his body and is carted into the makeshift hospital room for it to be extracted, all while screaming "FOR THE LOVE OF EVERYTHING GOOD AND HOLY, GET THIS GOD-DAMNED THING OUT OF ME!"

Live Action TV

  • Played straight in practically every episode of just about every Medical Drama ever, but most notably in ER.
    • Surprisingly averted most of the time, however, on Scrubs, where only a small fraction of onscreen cases are incoming emergencies (ER duty is considered stressful but tediously undramatic work for the on-call doctors, and is barely ever shown).
  • Brothers and Sisters, when Rob has his heart attack.
    • Also, in season one, when Justin overdoses.
  • Frequently happens in The Bill.
  • There was an advertisement for some...financial investing company, I believe, that featured a man being rolled on a gurney (camera angle taking the man's point of view). His ailment? He had money coming out the wazoo. "Unless you have this problem," says the ad, "you might want to consider investing with us."
  • Used in the Firefly episode Ariel.
  • A variant of this occurred in the Farscape episode "Prayer," in which Aeryn is wheeled down a corridor on a gurney that doubles as her own torture harness. For good measure, the Battleaxe Nurse and the Scarran captain are talking animatedly about dissecting her unborn child, while Aeryn is howling at them to get her the frell out of there.
  • Played straight and played with in Bones, as Booth is being wheeled into surgery. However, the doctor he's looking imploringly at is Brennan...
  • Amusingly done in one of Friends's flashbacks, when Monica accidentally cuts off Chandler's toe with a dropped kitchen knife. The doctors crash him through the swing doors feet first.
  • Played for laughs on the agriculture episode of History Bites. From the patient's POV, Teresa Pavlinek's doctor character gets the assessment of the patient's condition and calls for a trepanning. Every time, thanks to the extremely crude state of medicine.
  • Perfectly executed in The West Wing episode In the Shadow of Two Gunmen, first with President Bartlett, then with Josh.
  • Done in Castle at the start of Rise, though Beckett is out.

Video Games

  • There's a music video that uses environments from Silent Hill 4 and features Henry being wheeled down a long corridor.
    • It's also a part of the opening of Silent Hill Homecoming, almost certainly homage to the one in the above-mentioned Jacob's Ladder.
  • Used straight at the beginning of Second Sight.