"Move! Move! Code 5, nuclear wessel exposure!"
Sam: Hurts, does it, sir?
Mr. Bigger: Oh, no. I'm just doing this to while away the journey.
Mr. Bigger: Oh, no. I'm just doing this to while away the journey.
The universal way for a character to enter a hospital is to have the injured character on a gurney,
being pulled down a long corridor into an operating room, with assorted doctors and friends surrounding them. This whole thing is often accompanied by a POV Shot of our character looking up at a doctor.
When the place the gurney is headed is more sinister, our character may be strapped to the gurney to struggle. Compare Ambulance Cut.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
- Golden Wind: In Bucciarati's backstory, his father was rushed to the hospital upon witnessing a drug deal and getting shot, with him being taken down a corridor for surgery as Bucciarati calls out to him while being restrained by nurses.
- JoJolion: In a flashback, when Josefumi was a toddler, he nearly drowned in the beachside after getting separated from his mother, Kiyomi. He gets taken to the hospital for medical treatment as he's being rushed in while Kiyomi is sobbing besides him.
Asian Animation
- Happy Friends: In Season 7 episode 47, the ambassador of Suspicious Planet gets a heart attack the moment Happy S. mentions the name Adeli, due to his dislike of the Adelians, leading to him having to be carried to another room of the hospital in a gurney. Once he's finally back in his hospital bed, he ends up mentioning Adeli himself and ends up on a gurney and in the other room again, only seconds afterwards.
Comic Books
- Robin (1993): The Medical Horror-evoking cover of issue #165 shows Robin strapped to a gurney being rushed into a hospital by a bunch of villains. This does not happen in the issue, though Robin does fight the villains shown on the cover in a hospital.
Films — Live-Action
- In All That Jazz, the main character is repeatedly suffering from a heart attack and being rushed to surgery. One particularly poignant scene is done where he hallucinates that his ex-wife and his current girl-friend are on either side of the gurney, holding his respective hands. He looks at his ex-wife and says "If I die, I apologize for all of the terrible things I did to you", and then turns to his current girl-friend and says "And if I live, I apologize for all of the terrible things I am going to do to you". The main character is a serial philanderer who can/will not stop this activity.
- The extended cut of Casino Royale (2006) has Bond being carted away by paramedics in a hospital's hallway after being rescued from his recent Cold-Blooded Torture. Despite the type of injuries LeChriffe inflicted on Bond, the paramedics apparently did a great job, for Bond is making out with Vesper a few scenes later.
- A tracking shot from A Clockwork Orange shows the protagonist getting wheeled in on a gurney down a long hospital hallway.
- Played realistically in The Dead Center. There is no dramatic, crowded rush to get John Doe treated. He's wheeled out to his room by one nurse down a quiet hallway, who asks for help from the attending nurse to help him safely transfer John's body from the gurney to the bed. The attending nurse even mutters how much John weighs. If you've ever worked in, stayed in, or visited someone in a hospital, you know how common this setting is.
- Done hilariously in Evolution, when Doctor Harry Block has an insect-like alien get into his body and is carted into the makeshift hospital room for it to be extracted, all while screaming "FOR THE LOVE OF EVERYTHING GOOD AND HOLY, GET THIS GOD-DAMNED THING OUT OF ME!"
- Parodied in Hot Shots!. When the perpetually unlucky Dead Meat crashes, his bad luck is compounded by the paramedics slamming the doors on his head trying to get the gurney to find into the ambulance (it happens again at the other end with the hospital doors), then as they trundle the gurney into the hospital he's examined by a doctor who admits that he's not very good at his job and shoots himself up with the drugs he's supposed to be giving the patient.
Dead Meat: I'm in a hospital! What could go wrong? (Cut to his funeral)
- Jacob's Ladder contains one of, if not the scariest examples in film, where Jacob is strapped onto a gurney and wheeled through a dilapidated mental asylum filled with freakishly insane and deformed patients, the halls of which grow increasingly more dark, decayed, and bloody the deeper he goes. The scene is so memorably and infamously disturbing that it served as a chief inspiration for the hellish Dark World of Silent Hill.
- Jojo Rabbit: After the grenade incident, we get a series of POV Shots from Jojo's perspective including his ride in a gurney across a hospital floor with Imaginary Hitler giving him a Thumbs Up.
- Monty Python's the Meaning of Life opens with a POV shot of a woman in labor on a gurney, crashing through about 10 sets of doors.
- Inverted in Star Trek IV—the gurney bit is when they're trying to get out of the hospital, without being caught. The "patient" is perfectly fine by this point.
Live-Action TV
- Parodied in 3rd Rock from the Sun. The aliens impersonate doctors, following patients being escorted in gurneys and saying random medical jargon, and switch to a different gurney during the scene.
- In an episode of Babylon 5, Doctor Franklin is stabbed trying to help someone. We later see him being rolled into Medlab on a gurney by medical staff, with a POV shot from him looking up to see the rest of the B5 command staff pushing the gurney along and looking down at him (another hallucination, as the command staff had yet to return to the station from the space battle that took up the episode's A Plot).
- In the Farscape episode "Prayer", Aeryn is wheeled down a corridor on a gurney that doubles as her own torture harness. For good measure, the Battle Axe Nurse and the Scarran captain are talking animatedly about dissecting her unborn child, while Aeryn is howling at them to get her the frell out of there.
- Amusingly done in one of Friends's flashbacks, when Monica accidentally cuts off Chandler's toe with a dropped kitchen knife. The doctors crash him through the swing doors feet first causing him to scream in pain. Ross yells at them for the insensitivity as they'd just said where Chandler's injury was and should have known better.
- In the second part of Homicide: Life on the Street two-parter "Fallen Heroes", Bayliss ends up in one after Taking the Bullet for his partner and best friend Pembleton and with the desperate latter at his side. He soon suffers a seizure before being wheeled into surgery.
- In Odd Girl Out, after taking an overdose in a suicide attempt, Vanessa is soon placed in an ambulance and then wheeled on a gurney in the emergency room with her mother at her side.
- Phoenix (1992): The policewoman who gets caught in the bomb blast is still alive despite major burns; there's a Dutch Angle shot of the hospital staff (along with her distraught partner) rushing her down a hospital corridor.
- Saturday Night Live has a team of medical personnel rushing a gurney down the hall of a hospital, going through door after door after door.
- Torchwood: Miracle Day: In "The New World", Rex is impaled by a metal rod. In a subsequent scene, he is shown being taken through a hospital on a gurney, surrounded by doctors and Esther.
- The West Wing: President Bartlet and Josh Lyman are injured when White Supremacists shoot at the Presidential entourage and are brought into the hospital this way. Bartlet arrives first, and as his injuries are fairly mild he's able to crack jokes as he's wheeled into surgery. Josh's injuries are more severe and his arrival at the hospital is more dramatic as the doctors frantically try to establish the extent of the damage. The rest of the senior staff trail behind his gurney, desperate to know if he's going to be okay.
- In The Wrong Mans, in an effort to find Mister Stevens, Sam pretends to be a patient, and Phil a doctor pushing him along. It goes inevitably wrong; two gurneys get accidentally swapped. When Phil finds out that as a result, Sam is going to get his leg amputated, a mad rush ensues when Phil and his new patient try to get to the operating table in time.
Theatre
- City of Angels opens with a scene of a possibly mortally wounded Stone being wheeled into the hospital on a gurney ("Private dick. No great loss if he don't [live]," one of the orderlies remarks), then immediately flashing back to show How We Got Here. This is one of the scenes Buddy Fidler wants to cut.
- Men in White: Scene 1 ends with a woman being brought in on a "rolling stretcher" with a lacerated throat, "bleeding terribly", causing the doctors to snap into action.
Video Games
- In Mass Effect 3, when the Normandy first arrives on the Citadel, Ashley/Kaidan gets rushed to the ER after being critically injured at the climax of the Mars mission.
- In the intro of Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh, Curtis Craig is strapped to a gurney in an insane asylum, to be brought in for electric shock therapy.
- Psychonauts 2: Played for Laughs in an Easter Egg scene where Raz is being rushed to an operating room after becoming pregnant with Doctor Loboto while Sasha, Milla, and Ford (who are wearing clown makeup) assist him in the birth. It was apparently a bizarre dream he once had.
- Silent Hill:
- Brookhaven Mental Hospital's transition into the town's hellish Dark World in Silent Hill 2 is signified by a first-person sequence of James being swept off his feet and wheeled through a rusty, decaying corridor on a gurney.
- There's a music video that uses environments from Silent Hill 4 and features Henry being wheeled down a long corridor.
- Done with a twist in Surgeon Simulator 2013. The Hallway levels have you perform surgery on your patient during one of these, with tools being randomly given out on tables, and with everything flying around if you slam into a door. The Tooth, Eye, and Brain surgeries substitute the gurney for a wheelchair, but fit nonetheless.
Western Animation
- Beetlejuice: In "Generally Hysterical Hospital," Lydia injures her foot so Beetlejuice takes her to a Neitherworld hospital where she spends most of the episode on a gurney. B.J. is rushing Lydia to and fro trying to keep specialists from removing her soul from her body.
- The Hair Bear Bunch, in surgical gear, carry a tree on a gurney trying get past Mr. Peevly at the entrance of the zoo in the episode "Ark Lark." As they try to wheel the tree out, a branch rips off Hair's surgical scrubs.
- Iron Man: Armored Adventures: In one episode, Pepper's father is being rushed through a hospital corridor as Pepper is frantically attempting to speak with him, who can only tell Pepper that Mr. Fix was the one who attacked him.
- The Kim Possible Trapped in TV Land episode "Dimension Twist" has Kim and Shego suddenly find themselves pushing a gurney with Rufus as the "patient".
- Rick and Morty: The episode "Interdimensional Cable 2: Tempting Fate" begins with Jerry being rushed to a space hospital alongside his family after getting contracting deadly bacteria from one of Rick's experiments with the family attempting to keep him conscious.
- In the Roger Rabbit Shorts "Tummy Trouble", Roger is wheeled down a ridiculously long hallway to the operating room.
- In The Simpsons episode "Bart of Darkness" after Bart falls from a tree and breaks his leg, we're treated to him being wheeled through numerous hospital doors in the emergency room on a gurney. When he's finally placed in the waiting room alongside other patients, the nurse simply says, "Get this kid a magazine!"