By: David Koulack
The other day I got a message from the GP that I've been seeing for more than twenty years. She's closing the book on me because she's going to limit her practice to women.
That got me thinking about my father, his trials and tribulations at the beginning of medical school just after Harvard’s President Lowell said that there were too many Jews in medicine and then later as he began his practice in the Bronx after finally graduating from Tuft University’s Medical School.
How did a medical practice begin in those days?
In my father’s case it began by his renting an office in the same apartment building (1540 Charlotte Street) in the East Bronx that he and my mother lived in. My father put his shingle in the window of their first floor apartment, the window that overlooked the Charlotte Street sidewalk. His office was just down the hall from their apartment.
Each morning my father walked down the hall from the apartment to his office and each morning he sat at the desk in his office reading his medical books and waited for people to come in to get treated.
Waiting was a long drawn out and seemingly never ending affair. It finally got too much for my mother. She had an MA in biology (II think it was) from MIT and when she got fed up with waiting she went to a laboratory in Manhattan and applied for a job. She was taken on for a non-paying two week trial period but at the end of her first day she was given a permanent, paying position as a laboratory technician.
Then my father remained waiting in his office by himself for patents to arrive.
Finally someone did come. It was a woman with her 16-year-old son. The woman came out of desperation because in her many trips other doctors that she knew of resulted in no help for her ill son. As it turned out her son had gonorrhea. My father made a preliminary diagnosis based on the reading that he had done and then, much to the boy’s dismay, had the boy pull down his pants so that he could do a thorough examination. Based on what he saw my father confirmed his
preliminary diagnosis and sprang into action.
He telephoned one of the pharmaceutical companies in New Jersey, told them what he was dealing with and ordered some Sulfa drugs. The company was happy to send them to my father for what amounted to a trial use for Sulfa to treat gonorrhea. In fact, they even went to the added expense of sending the drugs by taxi.
The drugs worked like magic and my father’s reputation spread throughout the Bronx and resulted in a fast burgeoning practice. The attention my father was getting infuriated another general practitioner who came into his office one afternoon and warned my father that he would be in trouble because he was “only curing the symptoms, not the disease.”
At that time my father’s office hours were 12 to 2 in the afternoon and 6 to 8 in the evening except for weekends when his office was only open Saturday afternoon although of course he still made house calls on his off days.
Those were the official times but they were not the actual times. What I’m talking about is that invariably his office hours ran past the closing hours. That was because of my father’s concern for the well-being of his patients, a concern that went far beyond a medical diagnosis, the prescription of medicine and perhaps the arrangement for a follow-up appointment.
My father listened to what his patients wanted to tell him about things that were of concern to them, things that were affecting their daily lives—worries about their children, their aging parents, money worries and so on. He would listen and try to give them advice based on what he had learned by living.
And there was something else. The needs of his patients were paramount for my father. For example I know that there were occasions when my father made a house call, wrote a prescription for medication that the patient needed and then went down to the local drugstore and bought the prescribed medicine. He did that because some of his patients were too poor to pay for either the medicine or for my father’s visit.
And this brings me to the crux of what I want to tell you. My father understood that being a doctor meant caring for his patients in a deep and profound manner. It meant being there for them in all sorts of ways, sometimes ways that went beyond the official designation of the term doctor, whatever that official designation means.
Thinking about my father now, I think that I understand him better than I ever did. I believe that he chose his profession out of a desire to help people and to help them in as many ways as possible. Sure he could cure them of them of their various aliments but just as importantly he could help them find the paths to dealing with, and even overcoming, the vagaries of life.
©David Koulack 2022
I wish we could all go to your father now
Your father was the type of doctor that one wishes all doctors would be like. Here in Israel it's hard to imagine a family physician saying that she/he would from now on accept only female/male patients. Is there a feminist version of the Hippocratic Oath?