TGD
{°Shaun Murphy°}
30
Shaun has "almost perfect recall", extraordinary and genius-level intellect and the excellent analytical abilities that allow him to make highly accurate diagnoses. He is highly perceptive and often bluntly voices these perceptions, such as noting that Neil, his autism is depicted as obvious to many of the people he interacts with. He displays several traits of his condition, including heightened sensory sensitivity, abnormal inflection when speaking, lack of interest in eye contact and heavy reliance on routine. Additionally, he becomes fixated on certain objects at times, most notably the toy scalpel that Steve gave to him. He insists on eating the same thing for breakfast every day: yogurt and a green apple except for Mondays when he had breakfast with Dr. Glassman at the hospital. He loves to eat chocolate chip pancakes with a glass of milk, while having had a love from childhood of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on white bread and chocolate chip cookies. While Shaun was clearly uncomfortable treating Liam (the first autistic person he met), his unique insight into the young man's condition allowed him to recognize that he was autistic and not psychotic as was originally believed, help calm him through most of the MRI and figure out what was wrong with him. He was also able to get Liam's parents (who initially discriminated Shaun because of his autism) to see that they had caused their son to get sick while they subsequently began listening to Liam rather than unilaterally making decisions for him. When a buzzing light and the stressful situation caused Shaun to go into sensory overload and collapse into the fetal position, Morgan was able to get him through it by getting him focused on surgery and Park realized what was causing Shaun’s distraction and eliminated the source by smashing the light. When Shaun went into sensory overload again during a C-section, his first solo surgery, he was able to fight through it and come up with a solution to the problem.
The Good Doctor
