Cornell welcomed Tony Phelan, the co-executive producer of Grey’s Anatomy to the university on Sunday, Apr. 26. Phelan, who has produced, written and directed a number of episodes, spoke to the crowd about how medicine is integrated into the popular television show.

“All the medicine on the show actually exists,” Phelan said.

Linda Klein, surgical nurse and actress, serves as the medical consultant for the show and stays on set for every medical scene to make sure everything is realistic. Writers and researchers talk to renowned surgeons from across the country. These experts serve as consultants to the show’s staff.

Despite the unlikelihood of many of the medical cases used in the show, Phelan said, they are all based on real stories.

“We take a lot of pride in the fact that we’re pretty honest with the medicine … we have a huge responsibility to put real medicine out there.”

In the writers’ room, she explained, there are huge white boards with strange and interesting medical cases written everywhere. An episode titled “Penis Fish” — in which doctors discovered a parasitic candiru fish in a patient’s urethra — stayed on the board for four seasons until the writers finally figured out how to incorporate it into a storyline.

There were two autism specialists on set for filming when it was revealed that the character Dr. Dixon suffered from Asperger’s.

Despite the show’s use of medical cases that are often obscure and bizarre, such as Fibrodysplasia Ossificans Progressiva and even the Plague, Phelan pointed out that television can be a powerful communication tool. In a previous episode, an HIV positive woman found out that she was pregnant. The woman was informed that there was a 98 percent chance that the HIV would not be passed on, assuming she adhered to certain protocol. The Grey’s staff took a random sampling across the country and found that 20 percent of the general public knew that parent to child transmission of HIV could be limited before watching the show, compared with 60 percent after.