cover image MD: One Doctors Adv.Amg Fa

MD: One Doctors Adv.Amg Fa

B. H. Kean. Ballantine Books, $19.95 (402pp) ISBN 978-0-345-35821-9

Writing with freelancer Dahlby, Kean presents a warm, humorous, often profoundly moving memoir. Leaving his Indiana home at age 18 in 1930, Kean attended Columbia University and, in his second year at the medical school, studied with the renowned Francis W. O'Connor, an ``irascible Irishman'' who pushed him with a ``red-hot poker.'' His medical career began as a scientific sleuth, researching tropical diseases in Panama, and later, epidemics in war-ravaged Europe. Back in the U.S. in a Park Avenue practice, his patients included Gertrude Lawrence, Salvador Dali, Edna Ferber, Martina Navratilova and other luminaries. The epidemiologist's stories inform and entertain, but none so dramatically as his accounts of researching AIDS or treat ing a doomed Shah of Iran. (Feb.)