On his first day as a resident Kildare struggles with the question of whether to tell a patient---and the patient's wife, an old school friend---that he has been diagnosed with leukemia.

Kildare stops on a farm road to help a woman and her daughter-in-law, whose car has stalled. The young woman goes into labor and Kildare has to deliver her baby, who is stillborn. Afterward, he is sued for malpractice and decides to fight despite the advice of the hospital attorney that he should settle out of court.

A wealthy industrialist in Blair for tests gets a lot of talk and attention from staff, and particularly from a nurse who's hoping to land a rich husband.

A doctor has been working to perfect a heart/lung machine, and plans to use it on his seriously ill wife as soon as he believes the time is right. But her condition is rapidly deteriorating, and she needs surgery now and can't wait for him to perfect his machine. He also believes he's the only one who can use it on her, though Kildare has studied it under him and Gillespie prefers that Kildare be the one to use it during the operation.

Kildare finds it necessary to call out intern Louis Miller for incompetent acts on several occasions. After Miller's wife is hospitalized with Kildare as her physician, Miller in turn accuses Kildare of using the occasion to begin a relationship with her.

A nurse at Blair, long bitter toward her father, is deeply upset after his death when a funeral home owner talks her mother into spending excessive amounts for his services, with money that will have to come from savings that were to be for her younger brother's education.

A Japanese-American doctor discovers that his pregnant Japanese-born wife, who he thought was from Tokyo, was actually from Nagasaki and was in that city when the atomic bomb was dropped there at the end of World War II--and that she is dying from radiation-induced leukemia.

Kildare puts two women together as roommates in Blair: a highly maternal elderly woman and a young commercial artist diagnosed with a debilitating illness. But the two do not get along well due to their different outlooks. The younger woman does however fall for the older woman's son, which displeases his mother.

A pregnant teenager is admitted to Blair with signs of food poisoning, the result of an apparent attempt to induce abortion. Meanwhile, the father of the baby, getting little help from his bickering parents, struggles with his responsibility. The parents of the girl are also of little help in the situation. This is Part One of a two-part story, the conclusion being shown on the series "The Eleventh Hour".

Kildare is assigned to work with the highly frugal, penny-pinching veteran central supply nurse to clean out obsolete equipment. But the nurse doesn't think most of the equipment in the "Elephant's Graveyard", as the downstairs storage area is jokingly called, is obsolete.

Kildare is concerned by a number of careless professional mistakes veteran doctor Harvey Gruboldt has made lately, but Gruboldt accuses Kildare of trying to undermine him, and even becomes defensive when Gillespie calls him out for the mistakes, including those involving a mother and daughter Gruboldt has long been friends with.

350-pound Charlie Wade is unable to lose weight, and Kildare at first attributes it to his unwillingness to take his diet seriously. But after he is admitted to Blair and still fails to lose pounds the doctors find they must reassess their opinion, while the normally jocular Charlie is becoming exceedingly discouraged.

A story of two women diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. One is a seemingly childlike and overprotected young woman about to give birth to her first child. The other is a celebrated, award-winning political correspondent known as a champion of the underdog. How they both deal with their diagnosis may come as a surprise.

Dr. Gillespie runs for re-election as chief of staff for Blair Hospital but he is not sure to win so easily. An ambitious resident has talked a surgeon, who disagrees with Gillespie's conservative approach, into running against him.

An ex-football player turned surgeon is desperate to overcome the signs and pain of severe arthritis, which would end his surgical career, so he decides to try a medicine which has not been approved by the FDA.

A female surfer almost drowns when she falls off her board on a wave. She is diagnosed with petit mal seizures, which will necessitate that she give up surfing. But she feels this is like giving up her life's passion. Kildare is involved in her case, as well as that of the alcoholic young wife of a major hospital benefactor.

Yvette Mimieux as Pat Holmes cannot let her seizures keep her from surfing. She returns to the ocean. Dr. Kildare follows her to stop her, but he is too late. She suffers a seizure while surfing and drowns.

A retired heart surgeon, anxious to feel useful again, is called in as a consultant on a case Kildare is assisting on. Unfortunately, friction develops between him and the younger doctors, and his young grandson, who'd been depending on his grandfather for attention, feels left out.

While an acerbic veteran doctor recuperates from a heart attack, Kildare is assigned to temporarily take over his inner-city clinic. He finds it more difficult than he realized as the patients are reluctant to accept him, and the old doctor keeps trying to get in on the action rather than take time to relax.

A writer comes to Blair Hospital to do research on her next book, and incurs the resentment of Dr. Kildare, who finds her writing on medical issues overly sentimental. He is unaware that she is suffering from a serious illness herself.

In an episode with a comedic touch, an overly persuasive Good Samaritan brings an injured sheepdog into Blair and through her charms persuades Kildare and another doctor to work on him, and a Texas oil millionaire who is brought in insists on anonymity and poses as a nameless vagrant.

After his beloved young granddaughter dies during a routine tonsillectomy, an elderly man, upset by what he perceives as the hospital staff's lack of concern, decides to take action by planting a bomb in Gillespie's office.

A young diabetic has become neglectful in taking his medicine, mostly because of his difficulty in adjusting to his parents' divorce, and their continual arguments over him are not helping.

After suffering a heart attack, the hard-driving president of a major corporation still refuses to put his health ahead of his business. After a second attack, immediate surgery is indicated, sending the business world into a frenzy and putting pressure on his executive vice-president as well.

Kildare learns that a brilliant youth, self-educated in medical books but not accredited, has been using Blair prescription forms to forge prescriptions for the inner-city doctor he's been assisting.

Kildare deals with two third-year medical students working under him. One is brilliant in diagnosis but has a carefree attitude and refuses to in any way sacrifice his personal life for hospital duties. The other, his roommate, is on scholastic probation and is so afraid of failing that he becomes overly tense and often jumps too quickly to incorrect diagnoses.

A woman who just lost her husband after a long illness wants to volunteer at Blair to help severely ill patients. She decides to try to give a terminally ill young boy a day of happiness. But she violates procedure in order to do so, not getting true consent from the boy's emotionally distant young stepmother.

A private hospital refuses to admit a little girl in respiratory distress because her mother can't pay and doesn't have insurance. The girl is rushed to Blair, where she dies. After Kildare is overheard saying she might have been saved if not for being refused admittance there, the administrator of the private hospital takes Kildare to court for libel.

Janitor Joe Hogan refuses to have another operation for the cancer he's been battling for several years, because he feels he has no one to live for. But Kildare learns of one person---a girl in the apartment building Joe worked in, who is now dealing with a highly dysfunctional family life.

A young woman is brought into Blair after going into a seizure due to an overdose of amphetamines. She is treated by Kildare and Lois Bower, an intern he is dating. The young patient's boyfriend, who brought her in, is belligerent and uncooperative with Kildare and Lois. Later he and his friends follow the two on their date and attack them on the beach, forcing Kildare to watch as Lois is assaulted.

A college friend of Kildare's has become a prizefighter and is determined to get out of debt by going through with his next fight, despite a duodenal ulcer which could kill him if it perforates.

An eccentric, acerbic author checks himself in at Blair. Despite tests showing him to be in perfect health, he insists that he has a premonition that he is going to die, and refuses to leave the hospital even when it is loaded beyond capacity with victims of an explosion.

The wife of a Blair kitchen worker is brought to the hospital after collapsing at her apartment. She refuses to undergo exploratory surgery to discover the extent of a tumor, telling Kildare that she knows she is going to die. Kildare tries to get her husband to convince her to have the surgery, but this only leads to friction as the man and his wife have had increasing difficulty in communicating with each other due to different outlooks on life.

Gillespie wants to appoint his widowed friend Dolly Marlowe to fill a vacancy on the Board of Trustees. But Dolly has bigger plans---to get Gillespie to marry her.