Remember when doctors were iconic pillars of respectability and authority in pop culture? Before alternative medicine? Before CDC missteps? Before drug company bribery? Before all expertise became “elitist conspiracy?” Remember Dr. Kildare? Ben Casey? Marcus Welby? And how about the most enduring of them all, Rex Morgan, M.D.? Launched on March 10, 1948, the doctor-driven soap opera was the brainchild of a psychiatrist, Nicholas P. Dallis, who wrote under the moniker Dal Curtis. His intent was to create a doctor hero who ministered not only to broken bodies but to overall mental and moral health. Young Dr. Morgan, apparently not long out of medical school, moves to the small town of Glenbrook to take over the practice of the burg’s departed, beloved practitioner. The strip was very much part of the psychological turn in American pop culture after WWII. Morgan represented that new generation of more enlightened experts of all things both scientific and emotional.

But at the same time, Rex Morgan M.S. rightfully remains a monument of 1950s iconography. For many years under the hands of main artist Marvin Bradley and backgrounder John Edgington, the strip had the bland realist style of contemporary advertising illustration. Characters showed minimal expressiveness; environments were just as pristine and inexpressive; houses, cars, furniture were just as generic; and any cartoonishness was saved for the offbeat minor players and comic relief.

And Rex himself was not the dreamy empath so much as the moral enforcer, a tough-lover who pressed his small town of class and gender-bound stereotypes to face facts and get it together. In fact the opening episode in 1948 finds newcomer Dr. Morgan scolding one of Glenbrook’s wealthy leaders for spoiling his teen daughter, who recklessly drives into a young boy. “Your daughter’s behavior merely reflects your failure as a parent” Rex tells J.J. Van Coyne within minutes of first meeting him.

Like most soaps and situation comedy in the post-war era, the moral center of the universe, normality itself, was in the suburban American middle class. The wealthy were often portrayed as victims of their own privilege, and the laborers as comic relief or emotionally bombastic “characters.” Both upper and lower classes always seemed to benefit from the better example and good advice of a solid middle class paternalistic touchstone like Rex.

As in most medical drama, Rex Morgan, M.D. appropriated an instructional role, if only to give it greater authority. In the opening episode a single day is spent illustrating a transfusion, for instance.

And while Rex Morgan M.D. may have had the look and emotional range of an illustrated high school health book, one of its strengths was educational. Dallis intended the strip to surface medical and public health issues, which over the years would include alcoholism, euthanasia, domestic violence and eventually AIDS.

But at its most unwittingly weird, Rex Morgan, M.D. finds ways to meld science and sex. Even as privileged hellion Toni Van Coyne lays back to offer a transfusion it is unclear from her upward glances whether Doc Rex is about to take her blood or just take her. The 50s gender politics of Rex Morgan are pronounced at every turn. Nurse June Gale is of course quietly in love with the doctor, and it proved to be on of the longest lived teases in comics history. Rex and June wouldn’t wed until 1995. But Rex appears to be surrounded by women who are enamored with him in one way or another. The supplicant woman craving Rex’s attention, touch, or validation is one of the strip’s dominant tropes. And throughout much of the 1950s, the strip found many ways to police the borders of acceptable feminine roles and behaviors. A 1955 sequence introduces a medical woman, Dr. Lea Layton, whose professionalism is expressed in a lack of humanity that Rex and the other women of Glenbrook somehow must correct. Predictably, Dr. Layton has daddy issues, an alcoholic father from whom she has estranged herself and in the process from her own emotions.

There are times when Glenbrook feels like an asexual harem for the good doctor and the strip feels is a kind of doctor porn. Our physician protagonist is the placid center of gravity in a cosmos of women who live in a stereotypical realm of unruly feeling and fetish to be dominated by Dr. Rex’s male authority. Sniping, competitiveness, jealousy, scheming among the many women who surround Rex drive the soapy emotional threads that drive the melodrama. seem to swirl. Rex himself, of course, is the superhero of post-WWII paternalism. Bland but dependably sensible, he is the scion of the male, scientific, bureaucratic complex. His cultural role is to assert the authority of medicine, expertise and male stoicism against the chaos not only of disease, but self-delusion and unchecked emotion.

The Rex Morgan strip has never been reprinted in any extended way, and from what I have seen of the strip that is probably for the best. To give a greater flavor of the strip, I scanned and cleaned up a batch of 1955 original newspaper strips I recently acquired.

Its run in the 1950s is interesting more as a cultural curio, an artifact of post-WWII return to normality than it is of narrative imagination or artistry. For that our time is much better spent with Alex Raymond’s Rip Kirby, Stan Drake’s The Heart of Juliet Jones, Leonard Starr’s On Stage or John Cullen Murphy’s Big Ben Bolt. Each took the social realist turn in American comics in much more interesting directions. But Rex Morgan was certainly popular, and its titular hero’s name became synonymous with the knowing, steady physician type. The strip brought social topicality to the comics pages. And culturally, the strip speaks to post-WWII culture’s investment in a set of core values: science, expert authority, middle-class morality, gender hierarchy, psychological normality. In 1950s comic strip America, the object of adventure was less about exploring new realms than about rationalizing a new vision of American status quo.