Young Dr. Kildare is a 1938 film starring Lew Ayres as an idealistic, freshly graduated medical doctor, who benefits greatly from the wise counsel of his mentor, Dr. Gillespie. This was the second of a total of ten Dr. Kildare pictures, but the first starring Ayres (the character being portrayed by Joel McCrea in Internes Can't Take Money), and the first appearance of Gillespie. The series eventually continued with pictures centering around Gillespie once Kildare had been phased out.
These movies were the basis for a 1960s television series (called simply Dr. Kildare), which starred Richard Chamberlain as Kildare. Supposedly Ayres had been offered a chance to star in a Kildare television series years before when the medium was quite new, but refused to do so if the program was going to be allowed to have tobacco company sponsorship, then a primary source of television company's revenues, and this project was never made as a consequence of Ayres' stance. Lionel Barrymore starred as Dr. Gillespie in the movie, while Raymond Massey played him in the TV version.