The Social Medical Drama
Toyoko Yamasaki's Shiroi Kyoto (The Great White Tower) was serialized in Sunday Mainichi from 1963. The publisher's own blurb names its contents in a line — the cancer tests and the surgery, the mire of a professorial election, a misdiagnosis trial, closely observed, drawing the human appetite and calculation swirling through a medical world that ought to be dignified.
What is being examined here, then, is not a patient's body but an organization. A medical drama in which the phrase "professorial election" appears is more or less announcing that this is a story about personnel.
It has been adapted again and again: a radio drama in 1965, a film in 1966, television in 1967, 1978, and 2003, a special in 2019, and a Korean version in 2007. The same story being re-shot for each generation is the same thing that happens with the taiga (→ The Taiga Epic), and each time, the shape of "the organization now" is brought up to date.