Young Dr. Kildare is a 1938 film starring Lew Ayres as an idealistic but somewhat immature young medical doctor, who benefits greatly from the wise counsel of his mentor, Dr. Gillespie, a seasoned older physician. This was the second of a total of ten Dr. Kildare pictures, but the first starring Ayres (the character being portrayed by Joel McCrea in Internes Can't Take Money), and the first to introduce the mentoring Dr. Gillespie character, whose popularity seemingly surpassed that of Kildare, for the series eventually continued with pictures centering around him once the Kildare character had been phased out.

This picture and the subsequent ones in the series were the basis for a 1960s television series (called simply Dr. Kildare), which starred Richard Chamberlain as Kildare. Supposedly Ayres had been offered a chance to star in a Kildare television series years before when the medium was quite new, but refused to do so if the program was going to be allowed to have tobacco company sponsorship, then a primary source of television company's revenues, and this project was never made as a consequence of Ayres' stance. Lionel Barrymore starred as Dr. Gillespie in the movie and Raymond Massey in the TV version.

Fresh out of medical school, young Dr. James Kildare decides to leave his father's country practice and take up a position at a large New York hospital. There he meets the famous Dr. Leonard Gillespie who becomes his mentor. Kildare finds himself in serious trouble when he saves a suicidal woman who turns out to be an heiress with a powerful family. Written by Col Needham