"A wonderful picture of a doctor's life in (an almost vanished) New York."--Oliver Sacks

In the middle of the Depression, when the West Side of Manhattan was a small town of its own, the young Milton Slocum, MD, and his wife, Belle, set up general practice in New York City's notorious Hell's Kitchen.

Available around the clock for every medical emergency, Dr. Slocum tended to a vivid cast of real-life characters--mobsters, theater people, Old World families, boxers, and others--who became his good friends as well as his patients. Dr. Slocum's tales of his thiry-year...