Shout Out / St. Elsewhere

• In "Legionnaires, Part 2", the psychiatrist Dr. Beale is heard speaking with someone on the phone: "Mrs. Stephens, I don't think your daughter-in-law is a witch...You saw it levitate?...Well, perhaps it was an optical illusion."
• Overheard on the hospital PA at least once: "Dr. Howard, Dr. Fine, Dr. Howard..."
• Byron Stewart plays Warren Coolidge, an orderly. It turns out this is the same character that he played in The White Shadow. When Timothy Van Patten guest stars as Dean in the episode "Any Portrait in a Storm", they run into each other. Warren says "Hey Salami!" but Dean tells him he must be confusing him with someone else.
• In "Strikeout", Dr. Tom Swift is paged.
• In "Dr. Wyler, I Presume", Dr. Craig mentions that he and his old Army buddy B.J. encountered exploding bullets during The Korean War. He mentions B.J. again in "Brand New Bag."
• In "Beat the Eardrum Slowly", Axelrod chuckles at a The Far Side strip in the newspaper.
• In "Close Encounters", Elliot Carlin - played by Jack Riley, reprising his role from The Bob Newhart Show - describes The White Shadow as a great show and says that whoever came up with it was "a real smoothie." The White Shadow was created by Bruce Paltrow, the executive producer of St. Elsewhere. John Doe #6 later becomes convinced that he is Mary Richards from The Mary Tyler Moore Show and its closing credits, complete with the MTM Productions logo and its mascot Mimsie the Cat are seen. When Dr. Auschlander is asked what television character he would be if had the chance, he picks Trapper John as he is a doctor who is always cool under pressure and never loses a patient. As with the other shows mentioned, Trapper John, M.D. was an MTM production.
• Also in "Close Encounters", Captain Gloria Neal refers to Commander Healey of NASA.
• In "Time Heals, Part 2", Dr. Westphall tells his wife Maureen in a flashback to 1975 that Dr. MacGuffin gave him two tickets for a whodunnit play.
• In "Come Home, Oh Sapien", Carol Novino likes the song "Rock 'n' Roll High School" and Lizzie Westphall tells her that she should watch the film. This episode was directed by Allan Arkush, who also directed Rock 'n' Roll High School.
• In "E.R.", Dr. Craig complains to his wife Ellen that their house "looks like the day after The Day After."
• The title of "Where There's Hope, There's Crosby" refers to the Road to ... film series starring Bob Hope and Bing Crosby.
• In "Where There's Hope, There's Crosby", Dr. Craig goes to see a specialist named Dr. Todd Sweeney after injuring his hand. Craig's exit speech plays against a wall decorated with a razor strop.
• In "Getting Ahead", Carol Novino says to Dr. Bedder, "Bring me the head of Bill Belvedere."
• In "Schwarzwald", Helen Rosenthal's son-in-law Klaus Brinkmann mentions that his father and brother run the Schwarzwaldklinik in West Germany. This is a reference to the West German medical drama Die Schwarzwaldklinik (known as The Black Forest Clinic in English) in which the titular hospital was run by the Brinkmann family.
• In "Good Vibrations", Ebenezer and Marley Wright are named after Ebenezer Scrooge and Jacob Marley from A Christmas Carol.
• Also in "Good Vibrations", Dr. Craig says, "This is a risky business but I'm a top gun so we're going to cruise through this."
• In "Heart On", Dr. Craig says that it won't be a day at the races or A Night at the Opera for Henry Spooner after his artificial heart is installed. Later in the episode, Jack Morrison is reading a newspaper with his photo on the back. Someone has drawn on it with marker to make him look like Groucho Marx.
• The recurring surgical resident Dr. Steven Kiley, who appears in every season except the fifth, is named after James Brolin's character in Marcus Welby, M.D..
• There are multiple shout-outs in the Series Finale "The Last One". Warren chases a one-armed fugitive named Mr. Mirkin, who is Dr. Kimble's patient. The hospital barber Floyd Shapiro cuts Mr. Pearson's hair. Referring to Mr. Shapiro's longevity at the hospital, Griffin says that Floyd may bury us all." Novino performs an autopsy on "Patient #4077, Blake, Henry. Cause of death: plane crash." Later, she, Fiscus, Morrison and Jackie Wade have a group hug. Fiscus suggests that they sing "It's a Long Way to Tipperary", as the former staff of WJM did in The Mary Tyler Moore Show series finale "The Last Show".