Wednesday, October 17, 2007

page 4

The demography of the hospital staff and the community were alike. Jewish doctors and patients seemed to avoid the Park. Instead, they preferred the nearby Ben Maimon Hospital or the Jewish Hospital, where in 1942 Albert Einstein underwent his aneurysm operation by the great Rudolf Nissen.

The post World War II era brought significant changes to the Park. Sponsored by generous federal and city funds, the training of young doctors and specialists became increasingly profitable to hospitals. Not only could they enjoy the cheap labor provided by the trainees—previously available only to the greatest university hospitals—but in addition, the government paid—and still pays—the hospitals handsomely for each resident. Consequently, teaching programs mushroomed across America, spreading into Brooklyn and eventually the Park.

At the same time the neighborhood became poorer and less attractive to young American doctors, who preferred the ivory towers of the great cities or the more affluent hospitals in suburbia. To feed the numerous available vacant training positions, inner city hospitals, like the Park, had to recruit foreign graduates who flocked in masses to the US, mainly from the Third World. Between 1950 and 1980 the vast majority of the young doctors the Park managed to attract were Indians, Pakistanis, Iranians, Arabs, Tai, and Filipinos. In fact, recruiting teams were sent by the hospital to India to import residents. Rumors claim that the recruiters—Americanized Indians—earned large amounts of "backshish" money paid by the families of prospective residents.

The typical face of the hospital departments in those days consisted of a chairman and senior doctors—aging white Americans—and an isolated face of an Italian American or a Jew in a sea of immigrants from Asia or the Middle East. With time, the foreign doctors graduated from their training programs to become specialists taking over senior faculty positions. During the late 1980s the Park became a multinational tower of Babel, the Department of Medicine being predominantly Indian with an isolated pale face, who to the occasional visitor, looked like a tourist in Bombay. A few Iranian-born surgeons controlled the Surgical Department while Oncology became a pure Egyptian oasis.

Check back in a day or two for additional pages or send email to hodi@mindspring.com.

No comments: