Scrubs is one of my favorite television shows of all time. “But Eric, what about The Wire or Breaking Bad!?” I hear you yelling into your computer screen. Nope, for me, a good sitcom I can watch anytime while I’m going about my day is the purest form of entertainment. Scrubs is one of the best sitcoms ever, because it manages to balance being uproariously funny with the dramatic moments that come with being in a hospital and being in your late 20’s and early 30’s.
One of my favorite Scrubs moments is at the end of the episode “My Day Off” when, after Turk removes J.D.’s appendix, J.D. notices that Turk stitched his initials into the incision. This was apparently also the favorite episode of British surgeon Dr. Simon Bramhall, because according to CNN, Bramhall used an argon laser to carve his initials onto the livers of at least two patients he operated on.
Also, the United Kingdom apparently doesn’t have a great sense of humor about these things, because Bramhall was arrested and pleaded guilty to the crime of assault by beating, which is a pretty light metaphor for “carving someone’s insides up with a fucking laser like this is Star Wars or some s**t,” which I believe is an actual crime in the British legal code. If not, it should be, because, you know, it happened at least once.
Elizabeth Reid, a specialist prosecutor for the Crown Prosecution Service in London, said Bramhall’s actions were “deliberate and conscious.”
“Those assaults were wrong not just ethically, but also criminally,” she said in a statement. “It was an abuse of the trust placed in him by the patients.”
After he resigned in 2014, Bramhall told the BBC that he’d made a “mistake,” in reference to the incidents.
Okay, it’s pretty messed up to carve your initials into another living person’s body. It’s some serial killer s**t if you think about it. When Turk did it to J.D., they had been best friends for their entire adult lives, and also they were fictional.