Firsts
The series broke a network television taboo by showing a teenager's breast after her character underwent reconstructive surgery. This was generally seen as relevant to the subject matter and went relatively uncriticized.
On November 18, 1998, Chicago Hope became the first regular series episode to be broadcast in HDTV. The episode was entitled "The Other Cheek".
The series was one of the first to use the word "shit" on network television, outside of documentaries. (The series finale of the show M*A*S*H* was the first, the word spoken by Alan Alda's character Hawkeye after finally facing up to having witnessed the killing of an infant by its own mother, saving the lives of Hawkeye and other doctors on a bus). In Chicago Hope, the word was spoken by Mark Harmon's character after a meeting, in which he says "shit happens". ER would use the expletive several years later in the 2002 episode "On the Beach," when Mark Greene (Anthony Edwards) is unable to pick himself up off the floor due to his brain tumor.
Read more about this topic: Chicago Hope