The BEST episodes of Chicago Hope season 1
Every episode of Chicago Hope season 1, ranked from best to worst by thousands of votes from fans of the show. The best episodes of Chicago Hope season 1!
Television medical drama in soap-opera style. Surgeons Jeffrey Geiger and Aaron Shutte battle valiantly for their patients, often coming into conflict with the hospital administration, run by Dr. Phillip Watters. Their cases are usually ethically complex, highly sensationalistic, and very melodramatic. Meanwhile, Jeffrey and Aaron, who are best friends, commiserate about the shambles their tumultuous personal lives have become....
#1 - Growth Pains
Season 1 - Episode 17 - Aired 2/27/1995
After Aaron successfully removes a steel rod driven into a man's head in a workplace explosion, the patient miraculously suffers no motor or cognitive problems, but begins to exhibit severe personality changes that greatly upset his family and employees; when a patient in danger of dying from an intestinal obstruction caused by his habit of eating the hair he compulsively pulls from his head refuses the surgery that will save his life, Ray's unorthodox approach to treating the patient's underlying psychological disorder -- by getting Camille to assume the persona of Dorothy Gale from ""The Wizard of Oz"" and role play with the patient -- gets him fired, even though the treatment is ultimately successful; Alan's worst fears come to light when Alicia suffers heart failure, and he lashes out at Jeffrey in his anguish.
#2 - Songs from the Cuckoo Birds
Season 1 - Episode 22 - Aired 5/22/1995
Following Dr. Joseph's witnessing of Dr. Geiger's actions, the medical board suspends him until his case can be reviewed. However, there is some disagreement among the hospital's staff as to whether or not the suspension is in their best interests.
#3 - Life Support
Season 1 - Episode 15 - Aired 2/13/1995
When the gun belonging to a critically wounded police officer drops out of his holster in the E.R., the distraught brother of a man waiting for a donor heart picks up the weapon and threatens the staff unless his brother receives an immediate transplant; as Aaron and Danny operate on the wounded officer, one of the exploding bullets with which he was shot goes off and severs two of Danny's fingers; Geri performs a successful reattachment, but Danny may be facing the end of his career as a surgeon.
#4 - Small Sacrifices
Season 1 - Episode 13 - Aired 1/23/1995
Billy Kronk, a hotshot young surgeon and recreational hockey player, arrives in the E.R. with a critically ill teammate and immediately takes charge, steamrollering over Phillip; Alan deflects a suit by Nabbott, but not before bristling at Harold's ""toad"" routine in court and being thrown into jail for contempt; Billy convinces a psychotic mugger with a history of pica who has bitten off the finger of a concert flautist during a robbery to submit to an endoscopy to retrieve the digit; as Geri successfully completes the reattachment, Billy and Phillip discover a second finger in the thief's digestive tract, and realize that the musician has been given a digit belonging to yet another of the mugger's victims.
#5 - Love and Hope
Season 1 - Episode 11 - Aired 1/9/1995
The staff has its hands full when a man suffering from the after-effects of taking amyl nitrite suffers one complication after another, thereby necessitating multiple surgeries, and Alan takes one for the team right on the nose when he strains credulity in attempting to put the patient's situation in the best possible light; Geri and Jeffrey make peace; Camille contemplates having some plastic surgery after Aaron suffers from performance anxiety on their first post-reconciliation date; Jeffrey agrees to help Laurie put on the Institute's Christmas concert, but the preparations for the event begin to overwhelm her and put additional strain on her already fragile state; Danny and Maggie can't keep their hands off each other; Jeffrey confesses his despair about Laurie's condition and its effect on his life to Camille.
#6 - Informed Consent
Season 1 - Episode 18 - Aired 3/13/1995
Dr. Kronk's feelings towards his girlfriend undergo changes when he find out about her past. Geiger's heart patient develops an aneurysm which would take him off the heart recipient list unless highly experimental methods are tried. Meanwhile, Dr. Hancock's ejection from his clinic leads to bringing the HMO provider into the courtroom.
#7 - The Virus
Season 1 - Episode 20 - Aired 5/8/1995
When the Board of Health closes the hospital doors after several patients die from a deadly staph infection, the staff scrambles to find the source of the infection; Jeffrey and Geri help each other work through feelings of grief, loss, and guilt.
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#8 - Full Moon
Season 1 - Episode 21 - Aired 5/15/1995
As Jeffrey's anxieties grow over having a relationship with Geri, so does his model train layout, and he finds a fellow aficionado of the rails in Alan; after a terminally ill Charles Ellis is readmitted to the hospital with appendicitis, Dennis continues to honor his wish to stay alive as long as possible by fighting valiantly to get him the appendectomy he desperately needs; during the dinner party he arranges so that Geri and Laurie could meet, Jeffrey has a major meltdown after Laurie gets to the core of his problems with intimacy.
#9 - Freeze Outs
Season 1 - Episode 16 - Aired 2/20/1995
The staff works to save a young boy who was submerged in a frozen lake for several hours; Jeffrey and Geri have a little digestive mishap on their way to pursuing a relationship; Dennis fights to get an experimental treatment for a patient with AIDS, and finds an unexpected ally in Alan.
#10 - Cutting Edges
Season 1 - Episode 14 - Aired 2/6/1995
Laurie asks Jeffrey for a divorce so that she can marry Gilbert Weeks, a lawyer who is also a patient at the Institute; spurred by this news, Jeffrey suggests that Aaron perform an experimental procedure which may cure Laurie's schizophrenia; fearful that Laurie will no longer love him if she is cured, Gilbert goes to court to stop the procedure, citing Jeffrey's conflict of interest and contesting his guardianship of Laurie; although she is torn between the two men that she loves, Laurie decides that her future is with Gilbert and declines the surgery; Billy becomes a member of the staff, and agrees to do a consultation on Tamara, a teenaged patient of an old friend, Dr. Dennis Hancock; after Tamara is diagnosed with breast cancer and refuses to have a mastectomy and reconstructive surgery despite warnings from Billy and Geri that she will die without the surgery, Dennis uses just the right approach to change her mind and allay her fears of disfigurement.
#11 - The Quarantine
Season 1 - Episode 10 - Aired 1/2/1995
Tensions run high as hard truths ring out when Jeffrey, Danny, Camille, Maggie, Aaron, Arthur and Phillip are quarantined in an empty operating room after a possible exposure to Ebola; Jeffrey and Danny perform an emergency bypass after Arthur has a massive heart attack; Aaron and Camille reconcile.
#12 - You Gotta Have Heart
Season 1 - Episode 5 - Aired 10/13/1994
Phillip's religious beliefs and Jeffrey's grief over the death of his son put them on opposite sides of whether to convince a young mother to remove her infant from life support so that her daughter's organs can be donated to save the life of another baby; Karen deflects a flirtation from Jeffrey, but romantic sparks fly between her and Aaron.
#13 - Internal Affairs
Season 1 - Episode 19 - Aired 3/20/1995
Dr. Kronk makes a rushed decision to rescue a man by amputating his leg with a chainsaw, only to discover later that the man is a place kicker. A friend of Aaron's with Parkinson's disease comes to him for an operation...bringing his own donor material. A ex-nurse is admitted into the hospital and is given special treatment by Dr. Nyland, whom she used to date.
#14 - Great White Hope
Season 1 - Episode 12 - Aired 1/16/1995
Phillip is unable to save a promising young boxer who succumbs to the fatal effects of steroids his father gave him to enhance his performance in the ring; a pregnant young teenager carrying a baby with a heart defect seeks Alan's help when she is unable to find adoptive parents for her infant; Aaron fires Angela after his tax audit reveals that she's been embezzling money from his pension plan.
#15 - Over the Rainbow
Season 1 - Episode 2 - Aired 9/22/1994
Jeffrey runs afoul of the trustees when a grieving husband has second thoughts after allowing him to test an artificial heart on the body of the man's newly deceased wife; Alan comes to the rescue when a patient's HMO refuses to cover Aaron's operating on her very complicated and potentially fatal brain tumor; Jeffrey visits his wife Laurie, a straitjacketed patient in a mental hospital who apologizes for drowning their son Joey; Arthur's refusal to remove his wagging finger from Jeffrey's face during an argument leaves him with a bitten digit, and enables Jeffrey to diagnose the curable medical condition that's causing Arthur's resting tremor.
#16 - With the Greatest of Ease
Season 1 - Episode 4 - Aired 10/6/1994
Jeffrey tells Nadine about Laurie's schizophrenia and the death of his son; Aaron and Camille grieve about their impending divorce; several members of a family of trapeze artists are brought into the hospital in critical condition after a devastating accident during a circus performance; one of Aaron's former patients reveals his bigotry when he refuses to allow Nadine to remove his diseased gall bladder and insists that Aaron or another Jewish surgeon perform the procedure; Jeffrey exhibits signs of a meltdown when, in the space of a few hours, outrageous conduct in a nightclub gets him mistakenly arrested for soliciting a prostitute and he vandalizes the car of a man who stole his parking space; Phillip incorrectly attributes Aaron's angry outburst at one patient minutes after losing another young patient in surgery to tensions with Camille, and threatens to fire Camille if there's a recurrence.
#17 - Shutt Down
Season 1 - Episode 6 - Aired 10/20/1994
Aaron, the staff, and the patients are caught in the crossfire when Antoine Metcalf, a gangbanger and career criminal, follows his latest victim into the E.R. to finish off the job he started, and sprays a room with automatic gunfire before hospital security shoots him down; Karen joins the staff, and successfully teams with Paula to remove hematomas that are preventing Marcus Lavelle from walking, but the trauma of witnessing his mother's being injured in the E.R. shooting leaves the little boy afflicted with hysterical paralysis and still unable to move although the surgery has left him physically fine; reluctantly operating on the shooter, Aaron jokes about how easy and perhaps appropriate it might be to cause Metcalf's death through a surgical hiccup, a remark which comes back to haunt him later when Metcalf dies soon after surgery and his family sues Aaron and the hospital for failure to provide adequate care; Arthur engages in a little ex parte communication to put in a good word
#18 - Genevieve and Fat Boy
Season 1 - Episode 7 - Aired 11/3/1994
After Karen begins having seizures, Aaron discovers that she is terminally ill from the multiple brain metastases of a melanoma; Jeffrey resents having to perform surgery on a mobster about to enter the witness protection program; when the residents attempt to pull a practical joke on Jeffrey, they unwittingly provide comfort to a dying Karen.
#19 - Death Be Proud
Season 1 - Episode 8 - Aired 11/10/1994
Jeffrey strongly objects when his old nemesis is hired into the plastic surgery department, but they are able to set aside their differences to bring some peace to the mother of a young girl who dies during surgery; a nurse impedes Aaron's plan to allow Karen to die peacefully.
#20 - Heartbreak
Season 1 - Episode 9 - Aired 1/1/1995
Camille has an innocent and unavoidable mishap in the operating room during a heart transplant on the rabbi who performed her wedding ceremony to Aaron, and blames herself when the rabbi dies later, even though her mishap had nothing to do with his death; an inexperienced new nurse stands up to Arthur; wracked with guilt, Camille reveals the operating room mishap to the rabbi's widow, and only Alan's ingenuity in demanding an autopsy keeps the hospital from a major lawsuit; Aaron and Camille have it out over his lack of emotional support after the rabbi's death, and each of them admit to the hurt caused by their divorce.
#21 - Pilot
Season 1 - Episode 1 - Aired 9/18/1994
Camille serves Aaron with divorce papers; Phillip benches Arthur from further surgery when Arthur's resting tremor begins to endanger patients; Aaron removes a brain tumor from an elderly patient; Jeffrey and Aaron separate conjoined twins.
#22 - Food Chains
Season 1 - Episode 3 - Aired 9/29/1994
Arthur nearly fires Danny for failing to adhere to triage protocol, thereby delaying the treatment of a critically injured prostitute with AIDS; Phillip becomes the acting chief of staff after Hackett suffers a fatal heart attack during a little afternoon delight with Angela in the MRI room; Jeffrey and Arthur argue over the future of a baboon with the potential to prolong the life of Jeffrey's patient with heart failure and Arthur's patient with AIDS.