BTW, The 4077th was nowhere as big as the real 4 or 5 MASH units in Korea. According to the original book, they typically had about 200 beds for the wounded.
>> The 4077th was nowhere as big as the real 4 or 5 MASH units in Korea. <<
And for the same reason that every school-based sitcom had eight kids in the class, lined up in two-by-four seating arrangement, instead of the seven-by-five seating arrangements in my real 1980s classrooms. The TV show further reduced the size of the MASH from at least six doctors besides the CO to only three.
>> The 4077th was nowhere as big as the real 4 or 5 MASH units in Korea. <<
Actually, I looked this up out of curiosity. MASH units all had 60 beds and ten medical doctors. The movie featured at least seven medical doctors; the TV show initially featured at least six, but eventually only four. The creative reasons should be apparent: ten doctors is too large of a cast, and focusing on some subset of them would have required severely limiting plot devices.
I haven’t seen her here in a while, but SuziQ’s dad was one of the army doctors that helped develop the MASH concept.