Drawing patients closer: five gentlemen

As an intern at the Royal Victoria Hospital (Montreal), I began keeping a diary in black and white-lined composition books, the kind we had in grade school. The pages are collages of photographs, newspaper clippings from The Star, The Gazette and La Presse, and sketches of patients with snippets of our conversations that I made on whatever paper I happened to have in my hand--from prescription pads and paper towels to the wrappers of latex gloves and sterile gauze. learned from my father, a general practitioner for 37 years in the same town in which he was raised, Rockaway Beach, New York, that the attribute most patients seek in a doctor is the ability to listen. His office was in our home, where every afternoon the living room became the waiting room. I never thought of his countless devoted patients as other than our house guests.