Wednesday's Child

Wednesday's Child, the autobiography of a retired Cardiologist, spans seven decades and is written in three parts: Youth, Manhood, and Old Age.

The story is inductively reasoned, intentionally irreverent, and purposefully iconoclastic. It is an intimate vignette of incidents, personal and medical anecdotes, facts, and opinions. Family and personal relationships are laid bare as the author also describes his own flaws and shortcomings. Much like Aesop's Fables, the author seeks to find a kernel of universal truth in a litany of brief anecdotal episodes, some of which are humorous, unusual, entertaining, sordid, or salacious.

Part One, Youth, describes the author's social and ancestral roots, then follows him through the late nineteen 1960s, up to and including Medical School in 1969. He explores the difficulties inherent in the culture-clash marriage of his parents; an impoverished Texas farm girl and a first-generation New York Italian dentist who met during World War II. Family conflicts are laid bare within the framework of navigating a public-school education.

Part Two, Manhood, describes five years of postgraduate medical training in Internal Medicine and Cardiology at a New York City hospital adjacent to the Harlem ghetto during the crime ridden years 1970s. This was the era of pansexual 'free love' that ushered in the homosexual AIDs epidemic, the Disco craze, and excessive drug use.

The author describes the difficulties of starting a Cardiology practice in the posh New York Long Island Hamptons.  He becomes affiliated with the local police, a CIA operative, a loan shark and a spate of eclectic patients, friends, and celebrities. As a medical manager he must deal with several dysfunctional physicians and hospital politics.

Part Three, Old Age, includes a brief clinical tenure in Tennessee, personal burnout, dealing with aging parents, Alzheimer's Disease, and then retirement, followed by working for several volunteer services. This is woven into the author's opinions on selected social and political issues that plague the United States, worldwide racial, religious, and cultural bias, global warming, and finally-our planets future and its place in the universe.