It's A Worse Day Than Usual To Be A Turn-Of-The-Century Hospital Nurse

Earlier this summer, the period drama Masters Of Sex got in a dig about how far we haven't come by featuring a scene -- set in the late '50s -- in which trained medical professionals raised funds for the purpose of a childhood vaccination campaign; of course, vaccinations have since become a charged issue with the result that preventable diseases are back on the rise, because some of us spent the last fifty years getting more suspicious of science. But surely this week, the episode of The Knick in which a racist proposition leads to a retaliatory street crime and thence to a full-on race riot in which a mob puts the titular hospital under siege and forces key staff to flee to a black infirmary to treat the wounded can let us all feel smug about how much more enlightened we are now...assuming we didn't read one story about Ferguson, Missouri this summer.

The riot tests everyone -- even Cornelia jumps into the fray and ends up pushing a gurney downtown -- and by the end of the day, the adrenaline rush may have contributed to a couple of hospital ladies fooling around with a couple of bad boys. Okay, Algie isn't exactly a bad boy in that he broke Knick rules for the higher purpose of treating disadvantaged patients with few other options, but Cornelia clearly thinks it's hot as hell and puts the very bed he may have used to deliver those two babies to a different use...with sexy results.

And Nurse Elkins has asked Thack in to her apartment so she can get him to shoot her up with liquid cocaine and then have her way with him.

But before the terror sex...the patients. Actually, one patient in particular who gives Lucy a new perspective on the career path she's chosen.

Oh, Lucy! Get it together. Yes, of course, finding yourself holding a man's disembodied arm (and one with some heft, by the look of it) must be shocking, disorienting, and gross. But look on the bright side: you're not the one who's going to have to switch to loafers.