This [hospital] ward had a tradition that no patient would be sent off to surgery without his fellows gathering at his bedside to hold a wake. The commissioned medical staff forbid this custom as insulting to them and contrary to good medical practice. However virtually everyone in the ward was a combat infantryman and the wakes went on anyway after the nurses had left. At these wakes, ambulatory patients would gather around the bed of the fellow due to go under the knife, discuss his character, and regale him with awful stories of ineptitude in military operating rooms (wrong organs tinkered with, arm removed instead of leg, and so forth). They would also establish “dibs” on his various possessions in the event he didn’t come back alive and compose a letter to his family describing his sins and shortcomings. The only nurse who didn’t consider this tradition barbarous was an old-timer captain. She thought it an antidote against self-pity–the worst danger in any ward full of badly damaged young males.
Tony Hillerman, Seldom Disappointed, pp. 140 – 141
Out of Babel Books 
This reminds me of the Painless episode in M*A*S*H, the movie, where the doctors stage the Last Supper as part of plan to help a dentist who wants to commit suicide.
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Oh! Is that incident where the M*A*S*H theme song comes from?
Also, did it work in the sense of changing the dentist’s mind?
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Did it work? Well…yes. It sets the scene, as it were, for the second part of the operation, which involves a nurse known as Dish.
And yes, the song was originally written for this sequence, and was only later applied to the whole movie by making it the theme song.
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