But was this just a myth, used to liven up the image of a place known more for death than for procreation? Or was sex somehow inextricably woven into the tapestry of medicine? Intrepid journalist that I am, I decided to become a doctor and find out for myself.

What I've discovered is that there are many reasons for having sex, with love being only one of them. Of course, this is true everywhere. But not every work environment actually provides private bedrooms for its employees.

So what does the hospital do to people to allow their subconscious desires to make the jump to actual events? What effects does the hospital environment have over people's sexual behavior?

One effect of working in a hospital is a feeling of helplessness mixed with frustration. Sometimes patients are simply too sick to live, despite everything medicine can offer. Just because you sit with a patient for eight hours, titrating three I.V. drips of heart-pumping medications on a minute-to-minute basis, doesn't mean that she will survive. And as her heart rate decreases and her life slowly and steadily slips away before your eyes, there comes a sense of helplessness from knowing what's happening to every single molecule in her body, yet not being able to do a damn thing about it.

Of course we know, intellectually, that it's not our fault. But nonetheless, there is the lingering feeling of failure, the feeling that you could have somehow done something more. And it builds up within you over weeks, months and years.

Any adult knows that sex is, in fact, the best way to relieve frustration, with masturbation a distant second. Furthermore, it serves as an excellent means of taking control of some part of one's life. When everything else around you seems to be falling to pieces, the ability to choose another person and experience intimate physical proximity with that person is a great reminder that you are still able to affect at least some of the daily events in which you are involved. These events were frequent for a tall, square-jawed resident I once knew, who was uniformly lusted after by every young nurse in the hospital and some older ones as well. After his first few distressing weeks on the wards, it became well known that if you caught him at the end of a bad day, especially one in which he had lost a patient, you could coax from him a trip to the call room. In fact, the nurses even began to send spies down to the E.R. on busy afternoons, just to see how he was faring.

Perhaps only God, and maybe some of the janitorial staff, know how many nurses he knew in the biblical sense. He certainly had our support, though no one had the foresight to keep count. Nevertheless, there he always was, with a freshly pressed shirt and chipper smile bright and early the next morning. And if the previous nurse of the day was working, too, there was never any sign of the tryst that may or may not have already been forgotten. And that's how it went for three years.

The second reason for the prevalence of hospital sex is tension. The pressure of constant decision making, where the result often is a life-or-death situation, generates a great deal of stress. But rare is the time when you can simply go home and let it out at the gym, or on a neighbor's dog, because most of your waking hours are spent in the hospital, and punching dogs is illegal. And as any good chef knows, too much time in a pressure cooker and your stew is bound to blow.

This is especially true in surgery, where death hangs as loosely and easily as the sterile drapes over the patient. The individuals in my friend's large university surgery department have solved this problem by blowing their stew at the end of every academic year in an epic, Romanesque three-day orgy. At the end of June, they rent a suite of rooms at a downtown hotel, and the surgeons and nurses simply drink and have sex until passing out, waking only to repeat the process again. Rank plays no part, and there's no yelling at underlings for incorrect technique. The event is simply a release of the kind of tension that builds up over an entire year of having people's very lives in their hands.