Medicine Man: A Young Doctor on the Brink of the Twenty-First Century

Black (Murder at the Met) here writes a disjointed book, partlyand it's the more interesting aspectabout holistic and behavioral medicine, but mainly about a lackluster third-year New York University medical student serving his clerkship at the University Hospital-Bellevue-VA Hospital complex in Manhattan. Aaron Kenigsberg, son of a doctorwhich affords Black the opportunity to compare the old and current styles of physicianemerges as a traditionalist and not expressive of the practitioners dedicated to behavioral medicine. Bellevue, we're shown, treats an inordinate number of drug addicts, alcoholics, victims of knifings and gunshots, seemingly providing a lab for research in behavioral medicine. But not so in this book, for when Black writes about the so-called new medicine, he travels to interview doctors in California and other states, leaving behind his medical student, plodding through ward rounds in New York. Kenigsberg's duties prove to be the drudgery of routine, and at the completion of his six-month rotation, the reader feels as relieved as he to be done with it. November