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Wednesday’s Child, the autobiography of a retired Cardiologist, spans seven decades is written in three parts: Youth, Manhood, and Old Age.
The story is satirical, inductively reasoned, intentionally irreverent, and purposefully iconoclastic. It is an intimate vignette of incidents, personal and medical anecdotes, facts, and opinions. Family and personal relationships are laid bare as the author also describes his own flaws and shortcomings. Much like Aesop’s Fables, the author seeks to find a kernel of universal truth in a litany of humorous, unusual, entertaining, sordid, or salacious anecdotal episodes.
Part One, Youth, describes the author’s social and ancestral roots then follows him through the 1950s and late nineteen 1960s-up to and including Medical School in 1969. He explores the difficulties inherent in the culture-clash marriage of his parents; an impoverished Texas farm girl and a first-generation New York Italian dentist who met during World War II.
He describes the tribulations of navigating grammar school and college education at Duke University during the tumultuous years of the Vietnam War-an era when polarized politics led to campus riots and the temptations inherent in alcohol and drug use. Readers will also experience the behind-the-scenes rigors of Medical School and what it takes to become a novice physician graduate.
Part Two, Manhood, describes five years of postgraduate medical training in Internal Medicine and Cardiology at a New York City hospital adjacent to the Harlem ghetto during the violent crime-ridden years of the 1970s. This was the era of pansexual ‘free love’ that ushered in the homosexual AIDs epidemic, the Disco craze, and excessive drug use.
The author describes the difficulties of starting a medical practice and building Cardiology services in the posh New York, Long Island Hamptons. The practice and business of medicine, the perils of Medical Malpractice, and onerous interference by government regulations are described. He becomes affiliated with the local police, a CIA operative, a loan shark, and a spate of eclectic patients, friends, and celebrities.
The author then gets a Master’s Degree in medical management and becomes a hospital Medical Director. Clinical medicine segues into bureaucratic oversight that includes confronting the foibles of several dysfunctional physicians.
Part Three, Old Age, includes a brief clinical tenure in Tennessee, personal burnout, and retirement, followed by working for several volunteer services. He must also care for aging parents, one of whom has Alzheimer’s Disease. This is woven into the author’s opinions on selected social and political issues that plague the United States, worldwide racial, religious, and cultural bias, global warming, and finally-our planet’s future and its place in the universe.
