The Good Doctor by Barron H. Lerner

summers were largely spent at home, aside from the annual late August vacation to beautiful Wellfleet on Cape Cod. I bypassed the opportunity to go to sleepaway camp. A typical summer for me was spent doing my paper route and either going to a local day camp or taking classes at the public high school. I also “worked” for my father, requesting reprints for him of medical articles—often from obscure journals—the titles of which he had found interesting. In an era before the Internet and Medline, exchanging reprints was an important way for physicians to share information. I also sent out reprints of my dad’s articles. Even though many requests for them came from South America, Europe, and Asia, and thus required extra postage, my father saw the opportunity to share his work as an honor. My job, for which I was reimbursed, was tedious, but once again I admired my dad’s zeal for obtaining and disseminating medical knowledge.
    In the summer of 1975, between ninth and tenth grades, I embarked on a new activity. In addition to his other tasks, my father had become the medical director of Montefiore, a nursing home started under Jewish auspices and located in Cleveland Heights, about a twenty-minute bicycle ride from my house. Most of the medical problems among the residents were not infectious in nature, but my father was also a highly competent internist. I suspect he took the job mostly for the extra paycheck it brought in.
    As with other nursing homes, Montefiore encouraged teenagers to volunteer as “friendly visitors.” In taking on this position, my main task was to keep the residents company, either in their rooms, outside, or in the small coffee shop. Why did my father want me to volunteer at Montefiore? Perhaps, as with the not-too-subtle interesting clinical vignettes he frequently told me, it was part of his plan to push me toward a career in medicine. But I suspect that it was more related to his larger campaign to get me interested in something other than sports. As usual, I complied with his suggestion. The fact that two cute girls from the public high school were also volunteering there probably did more to motivate me than anything else.
    But once I started working there, I had to admit that I liked it. One of my earliest memories is my father taking me upstairs to the nursing home’s second floor, which was essentially a large dayroom for patients who needed full-time supervision. He introduced me to an elderly man, impeccably dressed in a suit and tie, who had been the chairman of medicine at one of the local hospitals. We chatted briefly and he wished me luck. When my father and I went back downstairs, I asked him what such an impressive individual was doing in that location. “He is completely demented,” I was told. “He no longer has any idea of where he is.” It was my first encounter with Alzheimer’s disease and an utterly vivid demonstration of how a healthy body could house a severely dysfunctional brain.
    I still remember the first two residents I visited. One, named Esther, was a warm and very talkative woman who probably qualified as the nursing-home gossip. The second, Max, was a polite and generous man who reminded me of my grandfather Meyer. Truth be told, neither of these people needed a volunteer. They were among the most high-functioning and sociable residents of the home. But I assumed that the head of volunteers liked to start out her new charges with simple cases. I eased into my position as a volunteer with little difficulty. I had always been a child who was quite comfortable speaking with adults; I showed them respect, used humor when appropriate, and was eager to hear their stories. Later on, my older patients would often tell me I was the only doctor who listened to them, surely an exaggeration but something I was nevertheless pleased to hear.
    The most memorable resident of Montefiore at the time was someone we would now call high maintenance. Ed was wheelchair-bound,