Medicine is taught to most people through television shows; having watched (and been inspired by) a fair-few television medics, I thought I'd make a wee list of my top five;

5. For long stretches of the West Wing, it's easy to forget that Abigail Bartlett (played by Stockard Channing) is a medic. She balances her medical career, family and her role as the First Lady with apparent ease. Dr Bartlett shows us that being a medic is part of your life, not your entire life.

4. George O'Malley put his finger in a cop's heart in a broken lift. TR Knight's character in Grey's Anatomy undergoes a mental transition from the "holy crap this is hard and terrifying and I'm tired" to the "hey, this is important and rewarding and I'm good when I focus" in the space of an episode. Realistic self-belief is something that often flourishes when we're put outside our comfort zone; George's elevator operation is less about being a gun whilst saving the officer's life than depicting personal growth under pressure.

3. B.J. Hunnicutt, the foil to M*A*S*H's Hawkeye, always struck a tone with me. His kindness and level-headedness in stressful, ghoulish settings was unbeatable if sometimes unconventional. Additionally, Hunnicutt (Mike Farrell) could rock a moustache like nobody's business. But it's is compassion, caring and inability to say Goodbye that rockets him up this list.

2. Omar Epps as ER's Dennis Grant. It was only in doing some research for this post that I discovered that prior to becoming the superb Dr Foreman on House MD, Epps played a role that affected my early awareness of the stresses of being a junior doctor. I remember watching the character's suicide by train as an early-teenager, and the long discussions it provoked with my parents. It's always been a reminder that medicine is not glory and heroism.

1. John Dorian vs Perry Cox have been battling it out as long as I've been at University; timing that, for me, is not withough significance. Zach Braff and John C McGinley (and Turk/Donald Faison) have managed to broach many of the contorversial and thought provoking aspects of medical ethics, death and whole-person practice that come with in-hospital experience. Evidently, I'm a massive Scrubs fan; each of the doctors on the show have strengths and weaknesses. I'll watch entire seasons on the trot, as much for the issues above as the fantasy sequences, plot, character development or scorching one-liners. The pilot episode "My first day" remains powerful and poingiant enough that I'll drop whatever I'm doing to watch it through. Where JD is overwhelmed by exhaustion, I feel inspiration and joy; It's two months until I face the music.