Another Brand of Medicine

My father's medical office was on Park Avenue and 86th Street in New York City, just 7 blocks from where we lived. He was very proud of it. He felt that a Park Avenue office in New York with “Joseph G. Druss, MD” on the door in brass was like a Harley Street office in London—the badge of a respected, successful physician. The rent was modest. It was the 1930s, the era of the Great Depression, and the landlord was happy to have any tenant who paid his rent on time. My father had grown up in a poor family of immigrant Jews in which neither of his parents had learned to speak English.

The office furnishings were lavish, with a definite Oriental flavor to them. Long before it was fashionable, he and my mother had taken summer vacations in Japan, Hong Kong, and later mainland China, and the office was furnished with his purchases. I have 2 of his small pictures, delicate old Chinese drawings, and a very old gold leaf fan with black calligraphy in my own waiting room now. They were bequeathed to me when he retired at age 85. My father was always pleased that he had more space and more rooms than he needed, and it almost broke his heart when, toward the end of his practice, he had to rent out space to a young doctor to help pay for his very costly present-day Park Avenue quarters.

The waiting room of my father's office often looked like a religious convocation. There might be a pair of nuns in full habit sitting together, a priest in one corner, and on Friday afternoons in …