There's a new Showtime program, "Nurse Jackie."  For those unfamiliar with the "televisye" show, here's a synopsis:

The program is set in a New York City "shpitol" (hospital) and stars Edie Falco (Jackie O'Hurley) as an Emergency Room nurse.  She's a strong-willed woman balancing a hectic work life with a complex personal life.  Some say that she is a "guta neshome"--a good soul.  Unfortunately, Nurse Jackie relies on drugs like Vicodin and Adderall to get her through high-stress shifts.  She bends the rules to keep things running smoothly. Imagine having to deal with indifferent doctors, penny-pinching/miserly bean counters, bureaucratic red tape, and robots that will replace hospital pharmacists.

The June 22, 2009, episode was titled, "Chicken Soup."  Here's the storyline: Did you ever doubt that chicken soup was good for the soul?  In this episode, Eli Wallach plays an elderly patient named Zimberg.  (BTW, Eli Wallach was born in 1915!)  Zimberg, who suffers from severe heart issues, refuses medical treatment.  He does not want to have one more angioplasty or bypass.  He claims that all he needs is chicken soup.  "They don't call chicken soup Jew's penicillin for nothing," says Zimberg.

His wife, played by actress Lynn Cohen, knew that her husband was terminal and continues feeding him her home-made chicken soup.

Unfortunately, chicken soup failed to save the patient, but Mrs. Zimberg got a great jab at the miserable Mrs. Akalitus (Anna Deavere Smith), telling her, in Yiddish, "Gey kakn afn yam!" (Get lost! Literally, Go crap in the ocean/sea.)

At the conclusion of the half-hour program, all I could think of was a line attributed to Alan King:  "My mother cured everything with chicken soup.  We always prayed she was right:  her second choice was an enema."

Judy Stanton, once PR director for Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami Beach, trumpets chicken soup as mm-mm good for the common cold.  And Jewish gourmets sometimes argue that if the state of Israel ever adopts a national bird, it should be the chicken.

Lewis Grizzard talks about curing the common cold:  "...call your Mother.  If she says something like 'Does my little tiger have a coldy-woldy?' you can expect to be up and around in no time."  Grizzard continues, "I don't really know if chicken soup works on a cold, but in the immortal words of my Mother, who was kind enough to feed me chicken soup when I had a cold rather than tying smelling bags around my neck, "Have you ever heard a hen sneeze? Think about it."

Henny Youngman wrote, "A Jewish woman had two chickens as pets.  One chicken got sick, so she killed the other one to make chicken soup for the sick one."

And Sam Levenson wrote, "To a kid coming home from school there is no warmer reception than soup vapor spelling out 'Welcome home!'  Frozen foods can only spell 'Come back later.'  I am not naive enough to think that soup or meatballs is a cure-all for drug addiction.  I cite them only as symbols of the relationship between child and home.  They have a good moral odor."

And, finally, Jackie Mason ("How to Talk Jewish") writes, "Chicken soup is one of the hallmarks of being Jewish.  It has a great reputation as the all-purpose cleanser, the all-purpose medicine, the all-purpose waker-upper, the all-purpose expression of hospitality, of friendship, of neighborliness. Chicken soup, for Jews, is what a pizza, a frankfurter, and an apple pie all together are for gentiles.

Chicken soup is the expression of everything a Jew represents,  It's a great expression of love, and since it is served hot, always conveys warmth.  It's heavy and fattening and poor Jews always ate chicken soup.  They always had potatoes on the side and chicken soup in the plate.  In the broth you add a matzo balls, which is rolled up dough, or you add a kreplach, rolled dough with chopped meat inside, or you'd have rice, or noodles, or kasha, which is buckwheat.  So between the potatoes and the chicken soup, the poverty-stricken Jew on the Lower East Side in New York for thirty years was able to fill himself up for twenty cents."

Getting back to Nurse Jackie:  At the end of her long shift, Jackie stopped to buy chicken soup on the way home.  When she arrives home, her young daughter, Grace, is totally absorbed in a TV program about the 1918 flu epidemic which wiped out 40 million people.  Jackie alleviates her fears by managing to get a few spoonfuls of soup into Grace's mouth.  Sometimes you just need some chicken soup!