Why did Doc leave Gunsmoke? His absence lasted six episodes in 1971
Doc Adams vanishes from Dodge City partway through Gunsmoke's seventeenth season and a new physician moves into his office. What the script offered as an explanation, what was going on off camera, and exactly when Milburn Stone got his buggy back.
Halfway through Gunsmoke's seventeenth season, Festus spots Doc's buggy rolling down the street with a stranger holding the reins. The show hands him a letter by way of explanation and moves on rather briskly.
Milburn Stone had a heart attack during the 1971 hiatus and needed open-heart bypass surgery. CBS wrote Doc Adams out temporarily and brought in Pat Hingle as Dr. John Chapman to cover the office, which made Hingle the only actor in twenty years to hold that job.
The version that aired
"New Doctor in Town" went out on 11 October 1971 as episode 5 of season 17, directed by series veteran Philip Leacock from a Jack Miller script built on a story by John Meston and Norman MacDonnell. Doc has left for the East Coast to go back to medical school, rattled by losing a young patient. Festus finds Chapman setting up in Doc's rooms, doesn't believe a word of it, and can't read the letter Chapman hands him. Chapman is written as sharp, unsentimental, and in no mood for Dodge City's suspicion of outsiders.
On screen, Doc went to Baltimore to catch up on modern medicine. Off screen, Stone was in California having his chest opened.
The exact gap
Doc is absent from episodes 5 through 11 — seven episodes across seven weeks — and Hingle appears in six of them:
- Ep 5, "New Doctor in Town" — 11 October 1971. Chapman arrives.
- Ep 6, "The Legend" — 18 October, with Jan-Michael Vincent and Kim Hunter.
- Ep 7, "Trafton" — 25 October, Victor French as the title outlaw.
- Ep 8, "Lynott" — 1 November. Richard Kiley fills in for a wounded Matt Dillon, so the show is short a marshal and a doctor at once.
- Ep 9, "Lijah" — 8 November.
- Ep 10, "My Brother's Keeper" — 15 November.
- Ep 11, "Drago" — 22 November, with Buddy Ebsen.
Read more: In Gunsmoke, who did Matt Dillon marry? The full picture takes in the TV movies as well as the series
Stone came back in "The Bullet," a three-part story running 29 November, 6 December, and 13 December 1971. Doc returns to Dodge exactly as Matt is shot in the back by a skinner named Amos Potter, with the bullet sitting too close to the spine for Doc to touch. They load Matt onto a train for a surgeon in Denver, train robbers stop it, and Doc ends up doing the operation himself. It is not a subtle welcome-back.
Stone's own read on it
He watched the Hingle episodes from home and phoned Hingle to compliment the performance, then told The Lima News in 1972 that the experience had confirmed something he already suspected: the show could survive losing any of them except James Arness — and, on reflection, Amanda Blake. You need the marshal, and the marshal needs his girl.
"For me, the sun shines brighter than it ever did," Stone said of life after the surgery.
He had been protective of the part from the start. At his 1955 screen test, told by co-developer Charles Marquis Warren that Doc was an Eastern physician, Stone informed him it was "my test, and it's going to be my wardrobe." He also negotiated perpetual residuals on every Gunsmoke rerun, forever, anywhere — a demand CBS initially called ridiculous and then granted.
Stone finished the run, playing Doc through the twentieth and final season in 1975, 605 episodes out of 635. He won the Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actor in 1968. He died of a heart attack on 12 June 1980 in La Jolla, California, at 75.
Earlier we wrote: Why did Gunsmoke end abruptly? The cast read about it in the papers — the reasons behind CBS's call