Dr. Kildare was less tough-minded than the other doctor shows of the early sixties, but this atypical episode confronted a topic that most viewers were probably loathe to acknowledge.  It’s the story of Roy Shigera, a nisei (Japanese-American) doctor who learns to his horror that his pregnant Japanese-born wife Hana, whom he’d always thought was from Tokyo, was actually in Nagasaki when the hydrogen bomb was dropped there.  Hana had kept that secret because it’s a source of shame among the Japanese, and now she learns (upon consulting Kildare for pre-natal care) that she is dying of fallout-related leukemia.  Suddenly this cosmopolitan, modern couple, who enjoy international cuisine and listen to jazz records, find their lives destroyed by the poisonous legacy of the previous generation.  The political is present on the margins, in the anti-American point of view expressed by Hana’s mother and in Roy’s childhood memories of an internment camp, but Paul and Margaret Schneider’s script emphasizes the personal.  It’s a tearjerker with teeth.  If this medical drama’s specialty was cardiology, then the final shot of Roy (a tightly controlled James Shigeta) extinguishing a candle in the hospital chapel manipulates the heart with a surgeon’s finesse.