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The show depicts the early world of medicine as an extension of racism, religion, fear, corruption, and ignorance. All of these ills merge with scientific thought, bolstered by the powerful white men who endorse them. They bear some of kind of misguided "truth" that allows groups of people to be deemed unworthy of proper medical attention, including African-Americans, women who need abortions (and must secretly get them done through a fierce nun named Sister Harriet), prostitutes, and immigrants, all of which sounds not so different than today. Here, Dr. Algernon inhabits a curious space—he's a better doctor than his white colleagues, but represents a group of people who aren't seen as human.This is shown in a scene from season two in which Dr. Everett Gallinger, a strapping, attractive man with a racist streak and jealousy toward Algernon's success as a black surgeon, happens upon a group of white medical colleagues as they extol the virtues of eugenics, proposing sterilization as a way to stop "mongrel" races from procreating and diluting the European bloodline. "Many of the great minds support this new line of study, including Carnegie. I will be teaching a course on it next fall," one of them boasts. Gallinger leans in, intrigued.The Knick deals with race in stirring, uncomfortable ways. In one of the best episodes of last season, a race riot erupts after a white man harasses a black woman and is stabbed by her black male lover. In sweeping, extended tracking shots and dynamic wide compositions, Soderbergh illustrates the making of a mob, as white residents tear through the town beating, punching, and bludgeoning any black person they see. Dr. Algernon becomes a target of their hatred because he works in the hospital where the white man dies from his stab wounds. Somehow, he's blamed. To save him from the mob, the sympathetic Nurse Lucy Elkins (Eve Hewson) transports him to the local black hospital underneath a rolling hospital bed with a thin white sheet on top. Soderbergh shoots the scene from Algernon's perspective underneath the rolling bed and sheet, and we see the sweat collect on his forehead.Dr. Algernon inhabits a curious space—he's a better doctor than his white colleagues, but represents a group of people who aren't seen as human.
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