Manhattan Country Doctor

Available around the clock for every medical emergency, Dr. Slocum tended to a vivid cast of real-life characters--mobsters, theater people, Old World families, boxers, and others--who became his good friends as well as his patients. Dr. Slocum's tales of his thiry-year Manhattan practice--many heartwarming or hilarious, others poignant reminders of the difficulties of the Depression and the dearth of medical advances--recall life "way back when," when corner drugstores sold leeches, the local candy store doubled as a telephone message center, the shoeshine stand was a bookie joint, and where the neighborhood women cushioned their elbows with brightly colored pillows as they leaned out of the windows to chat with passersby.

Manhattan Country Doctor is a moving, nostalgic account of medicine as science and art, of a colorful neighborhood in turbulent times, and of a man who exemplified the traditional image of the country doctor amid the teeming brownstones of New York City.

"Slocum won me over. The doctor has a deadpan humanism that allows the story to tell itself. . . . Tough, clear-eyed, idiosyncratic and fiercely honest, an original who animadverts on miserly patients, egocentric doctors, psychoanalysis and lucky Luciano with evenhanded fervor."--The New York Times Books Review