Hotel Doctor

Ever since blond, balding Dr. Willard Ellsworth finished his internship, he has been one of the house physicians at Manhattan's 2,200-room, jampacked Hotel Pennsylvania, right across from the Pennsylvania station. Trains leave the station for the doctor's native Missouri, but he and his hillbilly accent stick tight to the hotel. Dr. Ellsworth once tried general practice for six months in Colorado. He did not like it because he had to treat children. They were too much of a novelty after his hotel patients, who are usually in the fat & forty with gallstones class. He missed the stream of new patients--Dr. Ellsworth never sees three-fourths of his patients a second time--from all over the world. And he disliked the fee-collection problem, which the Hotel Pennsylvania handles for him by including Dr. Ellsworth's fee in the regular hotel bill.

Most of Dr. Ellsworth's hotel patients are men. Some are chronic heart or kidney cases, but the majority are drunks. They range from chronic alcoholics with the d.t.s, who have to be nursed back to health over a period of weeks, to women guests with a one-drink hangover. Some of Dr. Ellsworth's drunks are sorrowful, some are noisy and tear up the room, some come to the hotel for regular binges four or five times a year, some are just funny: e.g., one time Dr. Ellsworth, thinking a drunk was out cold, was telephoning for a nurse when the patient snatched the phone and shouted: "Send one with long fingernails. I have a bad case of the itch."

A weird group of patrons with which all hotels, especially tall ones, are afflicted are the suicides. Dr. Ellsworth thinks he has seen more suicides than any other doctor--in peacetime there were sometimes three or four a week. The suicides rarely used firearms, usually jumped out of windows or took overdoses of sleeping powders. One room clerk is said to have asked registering guests: "Do you want a room to sleep in or to jump from?"

The war has changed all that. The thousands of servicemen who stop at the Hotel Pennsylvania have colds more often than hangovers. There has been only one suicide since the war began. Servicemen's relatives sometimes get hysterical after saying goodby. More often a man merely asks for a mild sedative to help him sleep --his son is missing in action.

During his career at the Hotel Pennsylvania, Dr. Ellsworth has delivered only two babies. One was born to a woman who was rushing from Turkey to North Carolina, and suddenly had her child in ten minutes in a hotel bed. And there was a maid at the hotel who told the other help she was suffering from a tumor. The tumor turned out to be a bouncing baby which Dr. Ellsworth delivered.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.