The Least of These My Brethren: A Doctor's Story of Hope and Miracles on an Inner-City AIDS Ward

This book does for the medical view of AIDS what Paul Monette's Last Watch of the Night or the film Silverlake Life did for the personal aspect. Baxter compiled it over several months while he was staff physician at the country's first designated AIDS center, and now its largest: Catholic St. Clare's Hospital in Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen. Taking as his frame the hospital's quarterly recitation of names of the ward's dead, Baxter tells the stories of patients whose lives and deaths have affected him the most profoundly. The composition of the narratives out of these shatteringly affecting recollections is expert and ennobling. That the people Baxter is describing represent the ""other,"" rapidly growing face of AIDS-drug users, prostitutes, prisoners-makes the book's success all the more remarkable. We learn next to nothing about the author himself, except that he is an extraordinarily thoughtful and compassionate man who has grasped the effects of AIDS-on people and society-how it differs from other diseases and how it is the same. That Baxter escapes being either maudlin or saccharine with material so consistently close to the bone is a triumph of thought over reflex. (Mar.)